Instead, you’ll be ducking in and out of cover as you scale a mountain and avoid Banzai Bills, or collecting rocket boosters to reach the end of a Mario Galaxy-themed level. Defying classic Mario Party design, the game boards here each feature their own unique objectives rather than the classic “collect the most stars in a certain number of turns” formula. Party mode is much better, even for solo players.

Having finished, I’ll be perfectly content to never set foot in Bowser’s Tower again. Admittedly, there are a few interesting boss battles, which pop up every fifth floor, but they are over all too soon and the monotonous hour-long grind to the Tower’s top resumes again. Need to finish a race first? The CPU players won’t even be on the same screen when you gracefully cross the finish line. Need to collect the most bunnies? You’ll have double if not triple the number of your nearest competitor. The issue here is that the CPU players are locked on easy difficulty for nearly every floor save for the last few (where they are bumped up to an innocuous “normal” level), so the challenge isn’t so much in beating each floor as it is in staying awake long enough to do so. To clear a floor of Bowser’s 30-floor tower, you must beat three CPU opponents in one of two randomly chosen minigames. I might as well start with the most laborious of the three, Bowser’s Tower, which is Island Tour’s “campaign mode,” if you will.

Island Tour features three main modes: Party, Minigames, and the exclusively single-player Bowser’s Tower.

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