PETER HOSKIN reviews Mario & Luigi: Brothership

Mario & Luigi: Brothership (Nintendo Switch, £49.99)

Verdict: It’s-a OK

Rating:

Mario, who even are you any more? Roleplaying spin-offs from the moustachioed plumber’s mainline platforming games used to be quite uncommon, but in the past year alone we’ve had three releases that put talking and turn-based battling ahead of good ol’-fashioned jumping.

First there was a remake of 1996’s Super Mario RPG. Then a remake of 2004’s Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. And now there’s a new game, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the first proper Mario & Luigi sequel since 2015.

As with all Mario releases, there’s a great deal of charm. It starts with our jobbing heroes being sucked through an interdimensional wormhole and dumped into a world of cutesy critters whose society has quite literally fractured into a number of islands. Your task: put it back together again.

And it continues with some enjoyable gameplay. Brothership achieves a fine blend of JRPG (Japanese role-playing game) combat — you take a turn, the baddies take a turn — and Mario-ish adornments.

If you want to do serious damage, then you’ll have to time your button presses as though you are actually bouncing through a platforming level.

But there’s also something a little... off.

The script is amusing, but nowhere near as amusing as either of the two other Mario RPG releases this year.

The world is quirky and colourful, but isn’t the usual sugar rush of ideas and imagination.

The game mechanics are often quite shallow.

So if you want to play a Mario RPG, it’s probably best to try elsewhere. At least these days we’re spoilt for choice.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered (PlayStation, PC, £44.99 or £10 upgrade for those who own the original)

Verdict: A new dawn

Rating:

It's just a few weeks since I whined about a remastered version of 2015’s Until Dawn. That game already looked mighty shiny, so why bother polishing it a little and making people play — and pay — all over again?Now Sony has put out a remaster of another shiny game from an even more recent year, 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn (no relation). So surely I’m all set to do some more whining.

Except this time it’s different. It’s been a joy returning to Aloy’s origin story through this revivified release. Here I am bounding around a postlapsarian future-Earth, firing arrows at huge robo-dinos, and enjoying it more than ever before.

Part of it’s the sheer beauty of this remaster. Buying it allows you to keep the original Horizon Zero Dawn, allowing for easy comparison between the two — and the difference is greater than you might expect.

The landscapes are lusher. The animations more realistic. Aloy’s face more human and expressive. There are a few niggling graphical bugs — like bowstrings that pass through people’s bodies (ouch) — but overall, much like the 2022 sequel Horizon Forbidden West, this is now a current-gen game with which to wow your village elders.

And, even better, it’s cheap. Unlike the Until Dawn remaster — which is sold as an entirely new game, with a price tag of about £60, even if you own the original — the Horizon Zero Dawn one is simply a £10 upgrade option.

If you don’t already own HZD Prime, you can buy a knock-down, second-hand copy and access the upgrade that way. Which is, presumably, exactly how Aloy would like it.

In a world of rocks and dinobots, a tribal scavenger’s gotta take all they can get.