Hardcore players experienced with a wider range of characters will enjoy the new Events and Challenges, which put you in shoes of particular characters to take down tough objectives. When players bump into each other on the board, everyone fights - though the game lets more casual players have the CPU fight on their behalf so they can just focus on their board strategy. Each turn, players move a random number of spaces (but can decide which directions to move), collecting items as they go that affect their stats in combat. The new Smash Tour mode is like a mix between Mario Party’s game board and the series’s traditional fighting gameplay. If those aren’t enough, Nintendo added even more fighters from other companies’s games than were available from Brawl - all of which seem to be very well balanced.
But there’s also a few more niche characters, with contenders from old NES fighting games, the Xenoblade series, Animal Crossing, and even Wii Fit. As usual, you can expect Mario and friends as well as mainstays from The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon. Nintendo has pulled in more characters from its various franchises than ever before.
As usual, this leads to a big battle with series mainstay Master Hand. Brawl), the new Classic mode lets you pick groups of opponents to fight. Instead of putting players through a set series of fights and challenge levels (or through a barebones story mode like in Super Smash Bros. This mode is perfect for those with big TVs to play on (and 7 GameCube/Wii U Pro/Wii-mote controllers lying around), as the action can get a little hectic on smaller screens when people are fighting in different parts of the arena and everything is zoomed out. If that isn’t intense enough for you, this latest release is the first in the series to allow for 8 players to battle it out at once.