Mario Golf: Super Rush landed on the Nintendo Switch on June 25, 2021, the sixth entry in a series that had been quiet since Mario Golf: World Tour in 2014. Nintendo announced it during a Direct presentation on February 17, 2021. Camelot Software Planning developed it. The pitch was a big Mario Golf game, with a story mode that takes a rookie from a country club to the pro circuit.
What shipped is a game that swings hard in three directions at once and connects cleanly on maybe two of them. Mario Golf: Super Rush is at its best when it stops pretending to be an RPG and just lets you hit a ball.
Trailer, via Nintendo of America.
Speed Golf Turns the Fairway Into a Race
The headline addition is Speed Golf, and it is the reason to own this game. Instead of counting strokes, you race the clock. After every swing, you sprint across the course to where your ball landed, dodging other players and whatever obstacles the hole throws at you. It is frantic, funny, and unlike anything the series has done before.
The mode solves a problem golf games have always had. Traditional golf is slow and deliberate, which is fine for fans and deadly for everyone else. Speed Golf keeps the shot mechanics intact but wraps them in a footrace. You are still reading slopes and picking clubs, but you are doing it while Luigi’s ball freezes the ground under your feet.
That freeze ability comes from the Special Shot system. Every character on the roster carries a unique Special Shot that charges over the course of a match. Trigger it and every club in your bag gets more power, plus a ball gimmick designed to disrupt an opponent. Luigi freezes terrain. The mechanic is the game’s best idea for making character choice matter beyond stats.
Battle Golf and Target Golf Round Out the Modes
Battle Golf drops you on a special nine-hole course with a simple rule: sink your ball into three holes as fast as you can. It borrows Speed Golf’s urgency and adds a scramble for the same targets. The result is chaos in the best sense, though the mode’s appeal thins out once you learn the course.
Target Golf came later, added after launch. That timing matters. At release, the mode list was shorter than the scope of the game suggested, and the post-launch addition reads as an acknowledgment of that gap.
The core golf underneath all of it holds up. You aim for the fewest strokes, you pick from your clubs, and the lowest score wins. The Shot Gauge shows direction and curve against slopes. A scan feature helps you read elevation before you commit. You can play with buttons or use motion controls to simulate an actual swing. Both work, and neither feels like the afterthought.
Bonny Greens Is a Fine Start and a Short Trip
Golf Adventure is the story mode, and it is where Mario Golf: Super Rush overpromises. You enroll your Mii at Bonny Greens, the country club described as the birthplace of the sport in the Mushroom Kingdom. You train, you compete for badges, you level up your character, and you carry those customized stats into other modes.
The structure is sound. You learn the game at Bonny Greens, then travel across the land playing courses and their variants. You meet new coaches, pick up new skills, and hunt for buried treasure on the road to turning pro. Wario shows up and things get weird, which is exactly what you would expect from a Mario sports story.
The problem is length. The adventure mode is short, and the leveling and exploration never get room to breathe. You finish it wanting more, not because it was excellent but because it stopped early. The RPG framing is a good idea that the game does not fully commit to.
The Roster Does the Work
Mario Golf: Super Rush leans on familiar Mushroom Kingdom faces, and that is a strength. Each character brings a distinct Special Shot, which gives the roster a functional purpose beyond cosmetic preference. Picking a character is picking a tool.
The visuals are clean and colorful, and the courses read well at a glance. The controls are approachable for newcomers while leaving room for seasoned players to shape shots with power and precision. The game wants to be easy to pick up and hard to master, and on the shot mechanics it largely succeeds.
Where it stumbles is content volume at launch. The modes are strong, but there are not enough of them, and the adventure mode does not fill the gap. A game with this much reach needs more to do once the novelty of Speed Golf wears off.
What Mario Golf: Super Rush Gets Right
The shot gauge that adapts to the curve of the course is a quiet triumph. It gives you information without playing the game for you, and it rewards players who pay attention to terrain. Combined with the scan feature, it makes course reading a real skill rather than a guess.
Motion controls are the other pleasant surprise. Swinging to hit the ball sounds like a gimmick, but it works, and it gives the game a physical pleasure that button controls cannot match. Having both options available is the right call.
Speed Golf remains the mode worth returning to. It transforms a sport built on patience into something closer to a party game, and it does so without breaking the underlying golf. That balance is harder to pull off than it looks.
The Verdict on Mario Golf: Super Rush
Mario Golf: Super Rush is a good game with a content problem. The mechanics are solid, the new modes are inventive, and Speed Golf alone justifies the purchase for anyone who wants a golf game that moves. The Special Shots give every character a reason to exist. The controls work in two different styles. The visuals hold up.
But the adventure mode is too short to carry the weight the marketing put on it, and the launch lineup of modes was thin enough that Target Golf had to arrive later to help. The game reaches for the biggest entry in the series and lands somewhere closer to a very good one with room to grow.
This is the part worth watching: Speed Golf is the future of this series. If Camelot builds the next entry around that mode and gives the adventure mode the length it deserves, Mario Golf could become something special again. For now, Super Rush is a strong swing that stops short of the green.
Critics landed on mixed reviews at launch, praising the mechanics, new modes, controls and visuals while knocking the thin content and the short adventure. That split is fair, and it is also the whole story of this game. What is here is good. There is just not enough of it.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Title: Mario Golf: Super Rush
- Release date: June 25, 2021
- Announced: February 17, 2021, via Nintendo Direct
- Developer: Camelot Software Planning
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Platform: Nintendo Switch
- Series position: Sixth Mario Golf entry, following Mario Golf: World Tour (2014)
- Modes: Standard Golf, Speed Golf, Battle Golf, Target Golf (post-launch), Golf Adventure
- Players: Up to four, local or online
- Controls: Button and motion
- Score: 7.4/10
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