Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Review

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition

Release: July 18, 2024
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Genre: Action, Adventure, Co-op, Genres, Nintendo Switch Categories, Platformer, Retro, Switch Reviews
PEGI: 7
Comments:

 

Comment

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition brings back a collection of games from Nintendo’s first system for a bit sized speedrun love letter. Is this a fun game? Will players who never had an NES enjoy it? Here is our review!

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a collection of challenges from the original Nintendo system! There are 13 games available: Super Mario Bros 1-3, Legend of Zelda 1 and 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Excitebike, Donkey Kong, Ice Climbers, Balloon Fight, Super Mario Bros 2 The Lost Levels, and Kirby’s Adventure. You play through, mostly, bite size sections of each game.

The game isn’t about these games stories, its about the challenge! If you want to play the actual full games on Switch, you should go to the Nintendo Switch Online service.

There are three main modes: Speedrun Mode, World Championships, and Survival Mode. Speedrun mode is the only offline mode among these three. There are a lot of challenges in Speedrun and you’ll likely find yourself repeating some in order to unlock more coins to unlock tougher challenges. It can feel a little repetitive at times, but also feels good when you improve on your time.

World Championships mode will provide you with weekly challenges that change. These are the same challenges in Speedrun mode expect you are competing against other people’s times. In this mode, you are still playing by yourself but your time is logged online. It’s a neat concept but its too bad it seems to just be the same challenges as Speedrun mode. Hopefully some unique challenges will be introduced in World Championship and Survival, otherwise these modes may get too repetitive and dull in the long run.

As for Survival Mode, it’s a little cooler than any of the other modes. Here you compete against Ghost Data, other people’s attempts at different levels. You can have your screen be the same size as their screens, which is a bit tiny, or you can have a bigger screen while the other screens are tiny. I preferred having the bigger screen. Still its too bad that you can’t make any of the screens full size. Survival mode is pretty neat, but again, its just the same challenges as the other modes and there’s no real online multiplayer.

There is a local multiplayer Party Mode though, however we couldn’t try that out for this review. We’re sure its going to be a ton of fun and its nice that it was included. We do wish there was an online mode for this game. Perhaps Nintendo was just worried about potential lag issues.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a great game, but it probably won’t appeal to you unless you had an NES as a kid or if you played the Switch Online games and love them. This game is absolutely a love letter to the NES, so the games look the same and the menus look nice.

The menus in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition are well designed. Each mode is easy to understand. If you’ve played these games before, you know exactly what the graphics of each game will look like. The games haven’t been improved. That’s not the point of this collection.

Overall, Nintendo World Championships is a game that fans of the NES will love. If you’ve never played these games before, you should try them out on the Nintendo Switch Online first. This nostalgia fueled speedrun is for fans and for those who love to speedrun through games. Its unlikely that Nintendo World Championships will be something that players who didn’t play the NES will enjoy.

Though, once you’ve beaten all the challenges in speedrun/the other modes and then played the game over and over again, will it still be fun? We think if you love the games, you’ll be able to find enjoyment by going back to this game every so often. Hopefully though, some new challenges will be added via updates. Time will tell. Still this is a great game for NES fans.

Thanks to Nintendo Canada for providing a digital code for this game. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition will release on July 18^th, 2024.

Trailer