Speaking of, you’ll not want to pick this game up unless you have someone around that owns a 3DS. But still, I found most of the mini-games played to be pretty bland, whether I was playing against the A.I. You’ll get a pretty good mix of both, and the motion based ones don’t make up the majority. Thankfully the stylus input mini-games, and traditional face button games, fare better from a control perspective. But by the point you realize things have gone wrong, you’ve already started the mini-game requiring motion, and it’s hardly a great time to try and calibrate your system.

Mario Party: Island Tour will give you a heads up that if your system isn’t responding properly you may need to calibrate it, done by setting it on a flat surface.

Also, just about every mini-game that involved gyroscope controls was either non-functional or not fun to play. A lot of the mini-games feel like they were simplified for a portable platform, but I feel like Nd Cube might have taken that a bit far. The mini-games aren’t entirely awful, but there’s more bad than good here. But everything else here feels like a step back, with bland mini-games, awful motion controls, and the unfortunate lack of an online component once again. I also enjoyed the attempts at diversifying the stages a little more than what MP9 did. I was happy to see the board game elements revert back to individual player movement, dice rolling, and dropping the shared vehicle aspect of MP9. And the first 3DS entry, dubbed Island Tour, isn’t much of an improvement. The last Wii entry, Mario Party 9, wasn’t my cup of tea. Mario Party, as a series, is largely hit or miss for me.

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