Super Mario Bros. Wonder seems to be a resounding success for Nintendo. Today, the European Twitter (X) account revealed that the newly released 2D platform game is now the fastest-selling Mario title ever in Europe for the first three days of sale.
We had had the first inkling of the game’s performance with the latest UK weekly chart, where it reached the second spot (after Marvel’s Spider-Man 2) and only bowed to previous launches of Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario 3D All-Stars. However, that chart only counted physical sales at retail. Given the massive acceleration of digital sales, it was a fair guess that Wonder could have trumped them in combined sales.
In Wccftech’s review of the game by Nathan Birch, Super Mario Bros. Wonder earned a 9.5/10 score.
The first thing that will likely strike you when you hop into Super Mario Bros. Wonder is how gosh darn-pretty the whole thing looks. While the New Super Mario Bros. games sometimes had the cookie-cutter feel of something assembled in an editor, almost every course in Super Mario Wonder feels like a bespoke piece of art offering up lush backgrounds packed with fun details. From mountains made of rocky pipes to clouds mounded up like sundaes, cool snowy peaks lit up by glowing lights, and beyond, Mario’s world has rarely looked this good.
Any notion the 2D Mario team is complacent when it comes to level design is out the window as every course feels fresh, often serving up one-off mechanics you won’t encounter anywhere else in the game. Whether you’re dodging dive-bombing birds, scrambling over platforms you can only jump on a limited number of times, or chasing down nut-spewing groundhogs, every new course will test your skills in new ways.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s courses aren’t just creative, they provide plenty of solid platforming fundamentals. While the proceedings begin on a relatively simple note, later stages will test your timing, reflexes, and awareness. The New Super Mario Bros. games were often criticized for their difficulty curves, specifically, that the games didn’t get hard at all until near the very end, but that’s not the case here.
It was certainly a great year for the Italian plumber, who also enjoyed an unprecedented success at the box office with The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
