Super Mario Bros. Wonder Bellabel Park Switch 2 review: delightful, but inessential

The brilliant platformer’s Switch 2 Edition is an inessential but irresistible upgrade

And oh, I almost forgot — or rather, Nintendo almost did, because this wasn’t featured heavily in its marketing materials for the expansion — a new challenge mode featuring 74 remixed courses from the original game. 74!

This mode is called Toad Brigade Training Camp, and it’s brilliant. It’s worth highlighting upfront for players who already own the game, aren’t interested in multiplayer, and contemplating whether the upgrade is worth it. Toad Brigade Training Camp isn’t quite as substantial as it sounds, but it’s a solid few hours of pell-mell platforming challenge staged within one of the most inventive and refined 2D platform games you can find.

Toad Brigade Training Camp is representative of this release as a whole. (I’ve put off referring to it by name until the fourth paragraph because it’s called, deep breath: Super Mario Bros. Wonder — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park. From here on I’ll just call it Bellabel Park.) This is a scattershot expansion with a dozen different ideas, all of them playful and delightfully well executed, but many of them kind of disposable.

It’s busy and noisy; as a returning player, it’s odd to fire up a Nintendo game and have a similar experience to logging into a live-service game like Destiny 2 after a year or more away and being overwhelmed. What is all this stuff? Why do I have yet more currencies to track? But none of this matters too much because the game it’s all built from and appended to is an absolute banger.

Families, or players with a regular local multiplayer crew, will get the most out of Bellabel Park. Very young players and their patient parents will enjoy the Assist Mode that makes enemies harmless and rescues players from falls, and Luma, a new assist character who can fly around the screen (guided by either stick or mouse controls) collecting coins and zapping enemies.

The new multiplayer minigames are called Attractions and sit within the titular park. Six of these are available online or over local wireless and support 12 players; I didn’t get a chance to test them. 17 are for four local players, and each game has multiple variations across different courses, themes, and difficulties.

The Vs games are an absolute riot. We loved the delirious Coin Spree games: races to collect the most coins while King Boo isn’t looking, while money cannons shower you with cash, or while a chunky, munificent golden cloud god called Tip-Tap rains coins from the sky using his toy drum. Run, Hide! Phanto Tag is a devilishly cheeky spin on hide-and-seek in which players can disguise themselves as blocks or coins when the lights go out. Other games involve feeding ravenous Yoshis, battling random enemies, or battling each other with bubble guns. They’re all hilarious.

The co-op Attractions are more hit-and-miss. Is it really fun to count the number of times you jump in a level, aiming to hit an exact number? Or for one player to build platforms with a cursor for another to jump on? I’m not sure. We liked Fly Free, Captain Toad!, in which one player controls the stubbornly earthbound explorer and the other, as a bird called Plucky, does his jumping for him, and Sinking! Puffy Jump (I’ll leave that one to your imagination). The local multiplayer games can be played in randomized Attraction Tour playlists, which is probably the best way to experience them and makes for an energizing, snack-sized game session if you fancy a change from Mario Kart.

For a solo player, the Toad Brigade Training Courses are the meat of Bellabel Park. These are mostly time-based challenges, although some ask you to complete a course without touching any coins (incredibly counterintuitive) or keep an invincibility run going all the way through. Courses — all based on existing Wonder levels — often have set conditions, like character invisibility or particular powerups and game-altering badges, that twist and charge the challenge. They’re devious and superbly designed, as are the seven new Koopaling boss battles scattered through the game.

The Toad Brigade courses and Koopaling battles unlock according to your progress in the main game. Bellabel Park probably works best for someone like me, who drifted away from Wonder halfway through; unlocking the new challenges is a good incentive to return to the game and complete it.

And what a wonder it is: a ceaselessly imaginative game with a strong sense of its own absurdity, a mischievous mean streak, mechanics that have been perfect for 40 years, and a bracing willingness to go hard. It’s a 2D Mario game, in other words — perhaps the best since 1991’s Super Mario World, certainly the most customizable, and probably the best-looking, especially in its deliciously sharp and colorful presentation on the Switch 2.

If you never got around to Super Mario Bros. Wonder before, Bellabel Park is an essential purchase. As an upgrade, it’s almost deliberately inessential: a large tray laden with soufflés, amuse-bouches, and bon-bons to set alongside Wonder’s hearty meal. They won’t fill you up, or make the main course taste any better. But they sure look irresistible.

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park will be released March 26 on Nintendo Switch 2. The game was reviewed on Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.