Mario Golf: Super Rush review - nice additions, but the magic still lies with the basics

Why did Mario get the golf gig back in the day? I have thought about this often playing Super Rush, the latest instalment in the Mario Golf series. Mario Golf remains a fantastic idea, obviously: I begrudge Mario nothing. And in truth I struggle to imagine Link and co. finding too much inclination to go putting when Ganon has risen once more and the sky is on fire. Yet again and again over the last week I'd be playing Super Rush and thinking about Zelda. The classic greens of the starter courses have a Hyrulian calm to them, while a later course that introduces tornado spouts allow you to take to the air in a manner that put me in mind of Breath of the Wild's loftier moments. The inevitable desert course is busy with Pokeys, but I suspect it would be just as happy with a goron or five. Golf is about the landscape and the horizon, I reckon, and those are both fine Zelda preoccupations too.

Perhaps the reason Super Rush made me think about this with particular regularity is because of the new Speed Golf mode that sees you not just knocking the ball about but racing after it too. Hoofing over a hill on the trail of a tiny white dot means this is a golf game with a real focus on the banks and meadows you play across. You live in the land in this mode rather than teleporting politely from shot to shot. At one point early in the game's story mode I was playing a kind of cross-country golf, where I moved between challenges, teeing off for the next target from the hole I had just sunk. I had to plan my way across the landscape, to plot, figuring how to use tornados to overcome sudden elevation changes and chunks of grey rock. Someone sitting nearby observed that it looked a bit like a nightmare, but I was surprisingly unhorrified over all: It was tactical and playful and bucolic and prone to the whim of fate. It was Zelda to its core.

And yet, of course, with other players on the greens, Speed Golf is also hectic and pushy-shovey and filled with lovely Mushroom Kingdom business. Wario barges you out of the way, Yoshi rolls past on a giant egg, a grumpy lump of magma keeps you from snagging the row of golden coins you were aiming for on your way to your ball, which has been knocked off the fairway and into the rough, possibly by that bastard Luigi. Maybe Zelda was right to stay at home after all - at times, when it properly clicks, Super Rush can feel a bit like Baby Park, the looping bloodbath feared and loved by all players of Mario Kart Double-Dash. Mercy.

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