Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV Review

This review covers Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV. It focuses solely on the changes to the base Super Mario Party Jamboree when played on a Nintendo Switch 2, as well as the new modes and gameplay introduced in the additional content, Jamboree TV. Our original review still applies to the majority of the game.

When Super Mario Party Jamboree released last year, I was genuinely surprised — and quickly became a big fan. It delivered a truly complete Mario Party experience, offering plenty for all kinds of players: single-player, online, local multiplayer. Everything was integrated so seamlessly that it was easy to set up and just a joy to play.

See, when you boot up Jamboree without the DLC — or previously on the original Switch — you’re taken straight into a lovingly crafted, interactive, and fun hub world to explore and customise as you like. You can pick and choose from all of Jamboree’s wonderful game modes right from this menu, with everything neatly siloed off based on the mode or how you want to play.

This downloadable package inserts itself before all that with a horribly generic menu, where you choose between Jamboree as it was on the Nintendo Switch, Jamboree TV with the new Switch 2 modes and gameplay features, or boot into GameShare. It takes what was a wonderfully tight package and splits it into three (well, really two) separate sections — and never shall the two meet.

When you boot into Jamboree TV, the game presents itself as a TV show hosted by Toad, offering four different ways to play. Bowser Live is where the camera and microphone mini-games live. Basically, you play three mini-games: two selected from a small pool, followed by one that’s either a tiebreaker or a win-all round. The mini-games are painfully average, with the best being the one where you hit a imaginary coin block above your head—or the microphone one, where you have to clap in time with a music track at the bottom of the screen that looks straight out of Donkey Konga.

You’ll probably experience everything on offer in just over an hour; there only seems to be a literal handful of games, and that’s if you even have a USB camera connected. The tiebreaker game also requires you to move around and shout at the Switch 2, and no matter how much we yelled and jiggled around like idiots, it just wouldn’t register whatever it was looking for—so we lost nearly every time.

There’s also some weirdness with the camera. I used two cameras to test the game: the Piranha Plant Camera perched on top of the TV, and the Nintendo Switch 2 Camera from Nintendo. The Piranha Plant Camera is, frankly, shit. It struggles to pick people out of the crowd at all and just isn’t suited at all. The Nintendo camera is much better and seems to have a wider field of view. However, when you set up the camera, it asks you to pick out people’s faces from the crowd without any sort of a guide or placement – its just wherever you’re sitting.

But then it asks you to get up and play the mini-games in a separate part of the room. So you either have to stand in the same spot the entire time, or guess where the boxes for the camera games are going to be. Even if you don’t want to play those mini-games, you can still add your avatar in-game so people can see your reactions on screen while you play which works just fine. You’ll probably play Bowser Live once and never touch it again. And for those saying, “Well, it’s probably meant for kids”—I played it with mine, and because I’m twice her height, someone had to lift her up just so she could play at the same level as the adults. So it’s either designed for kids or no one at all.

Thankfully, things get a lot better with the mouse mini-games—not just in presentation, but because they’re actually fun to play. Carnival Coaster lets up to four players play a round of mouse mini-games while riding a rollercoaster. You need to earn higher ranks to keep riding, which is done by shooting enemies as you travel through five different courses. Four of them have different themes, and the final one is much harder, basically requiring S or A ranks as Bowser chases you down.

While the rollercoaster is a bit of a click-fest, other mini-games use the mouse in different ways. Shell Hockey is a classic air hockey table (with shells), Bowser Filter has you sorting letters into folders on a computer, and Domino Effect tasks players with lining up dominoes to fall in the right spot. Some games are about precision, others about speed—it’s a good mix across the 14 different mini-games. Some are played solo, others are co-op, depending on how many players you have.

Then there’s Mario Party mode—which, as you’d expect, is classic Mario Party but with the new mini-games added in (though, according to Nintendo, a few seem to be missing). There are also two new ways to play Mario Party that weren’t available in regular Jamboree. Frenzy Rules starts the game with just 5 turns left in the “homestretch.” Blue and red spaces give more coins, and everyone starts with more coins, a star, and double dice. There are also two special events instead of one, which should shake up strategies in this fast-paced version of the game.

Then there’s Tag-Team, where players are grouped into two-on-two battles. You and your teammate work together to collect coins and stars, but you’re still limited to carrying only three items. There’s also a new type of die called the Together Dice, which calls your teammate over so you can move at the same time. If you land on a star space, both of you can claim one. These new twists are great additions. The five-turn mode is a fun, quick way to play, and Tag-Team introduces fresh strategies that shake things up in all the right ways. Lastly Free Play rounds up the ways to play the new games, and you guess you can pick whatever you want to play – freely. 

GameShare is the other big talking point on the box of this update (I don’t have a box, but I assume it’s on there too). You can use your Switch 2 console to share the game with up to three other Switch 2, Switch, or Switch Lite consoles and all play one game of Mario Party. And by “one game,” I really mean one game—because you can only play on the Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party, and there are just 30 mini-games available, none of which are the new ones. That’s because this mode is handheld-only, and not everyone’s going to have a mouse.

Like all GameShare features, it works as well as it wants to. Most of the time you’ll get a perfect stream from the host system—but sometimes it just turns into compression city for no reason at all. Still, it’s kind of magic… even if it’s very limited.

This Nintendo Switch 2 Edition also gets a graphical polish thanks to the power of the Switch 2, but there are some caveats. In docked mode, you can expect up to 1440p, and handheld runs at a crisp 1080p. However, only Jamboree TV mode in docked actually runs at the higher resolution. So if you want to enjoy the really sharp visuals — and they are genuinely quite nice — you’ll need to stick to the new modes and the “Mario Party” setup within Jamboree TV, but then some of the mini games are missing too. If you switch back to the base game, it looks basically the same as it did on the original Switch (which was quite nice) and with “freebie” improvements like faster loading times. All of the other modes in Jamboree like Bowser Kaboom Squad and Koopathlon remain in the base game with no graphical improvements.

The camera functionality requires a separate purchase, and the microphone games just aren’t that fun. This ends up being a more expensive upgrade than Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Yes, it has new content, but so did those games, and their graphical updates were far more impactful. In the Zelda titles, the new content was tucked away in a companion app, which was super annoying, but here Nintendo has split the game in two, forcing you to jump between modes — and if you switch to the base game docked, you lose the visual upgrades.

I hope Nintendo handles future Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + New Content releases in a more organised and organic way. It’s overly complicated to play through the different modes, with caveats everywhere, which means some modes don’t get the proper Switch 2 Edition treatment. Mario Party superfans will enjoy the new modes for the main board games, but the Jamboree TV additions—aside from the mouse games—are a bit average. Jamboree was a solid and complete package, and this just splits it all up and breaks the flow.

Rating: 3/5

Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV is available at retail as a separate release; the Upgrade Pack for the Nintendo Switch 2 will download automatically when the game card is inserted. You can also purchase the Upgrade Pack separately for $30 AUD.