Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a crossover fighting game featuring a huge range of characters from various other games and franchises, thanks to the partnership between Bandai, Sora and Nintendo. Of course, given the name, all the characters from the Mario Bros games world appear, with varying skills and degrees of customisability. This is the fifth game in this series, and offers a massive seventy (70!) playable characters.

Some of the games whose characters appear in this game include: Animal Crossing, Castlevania, Metroid, and some selected Pokémon from the Pokémon universe.

About the Game

The premise of the game is very simple indeed: battle your opponent and win! However, there are some fine points that make the game more interesting: each character has different strengths and weaknesses; and all have more than one combat style.

The player must determine firstly, which character they want to play as – an interesting decision if you do not know who your opponent will choose – and secondly, which of their attacking styles will work the best to defeat your opponent. Or, if you like a challenge, which you should choose to make the match a close one until you are ready to administer the coup de grace.

The death blow, by the way, actually means punting your opponent off the battle arena and into the ether, rather than anything gory or distressing for younger players. It is still immensely satisfying to win thanks to the rumble features in the Switch controllers which will make you feel as though you have had a real work out!

Modes of Play

There are several modes of play for the player to choose from: some are recognisable from previous versions of the game; others are brand new for this release:

• Classic: a series of themed challenges in which your choice of playing character makes all the difference as your fighting style is tied to the character’s own game persona
• World of Light: a single player mode where you are faced with ridiculously difficult opponents – but you are given almost equally ridiculous powers with which to beat them in turn!
• Smash: choose your setting, make your own rules (or agree on them amongst all eight players) and then get smashing, seeing who can boot who off into space the quickest and who can dodge the quickest and the best
• Special Smash: pair up with a real life friend to play through every character to see which would come out on top in a fair fight in Smashdown. You can also customise characters to put your own special stamp on them
• Smashdown: work your way through a series of matches: but there is a catch. Once you have used – and won – with one character, you cannot use that character again in later stages. This means you have to calculate your odds of winning and choose your favourite characters with care, being torn between getting knocked out before you can use them or using them too soon and ending up on a hard level with a relatively unknown character
• Squad Strike: team up with your buddies to make squads of three or five and then battle one on one until one team achieves a win
• Tournament (Tourney): face up to 32 other players to become the tourney champion. This means you will fight up to fifteen ever more tricky battles until you achieve victory: but just imagine your pride when you pull it off!