Mario Paint is one of those games that you never forget because it’s just so bad. The game had some real potential initially but unfortunately it could not live up to that. The biggest issue here are the controls which are some of the worst that I’ve played with. It decides to turn your controller into a mouse and so you have to click on things as if you’re playing on the computer. It takes away all the potential for a smooth gameplay experience and turns it all upside down. A massive mistake if you ask me.

The game has 3 main modes, the paint, the music, and the fly swatter game. The painting part lets you make fun little pictures with a lot of tools that the game presents you with. There are a good amount of options to be sure but good luck using them without clicking on the wrong things multiple times. No matter how many times you try to grab something, the mouse will fail you. In a way it’s like the original version of motion controls so it is every bit as clunky as you might have expected.

Then you have the fly swatter minigame which is an interesting concept. I’d rather be swatting robots or something but it does take a lot of skill here. Thanks to the controls, I would even say that it is ultra hard. It’s going to take you a long while to take down all 100 flies and odds are that you will die before beating 30 of them. Conquering this mode would really be a feather in your cap.

Finally you have the music mode which was my personal favorite one. Basically you get to put different icons onto the music sheet and Mario will play them out for you. It’s pretty fun and gets you used to composing your own music. You can slow down and speed up the tempo as well to really get the exact sound that you want. So it all works out pretty well but I will say that you will still run out of content very quickly.

That’s probably the second biggest problem with the game after the lack of a good control setup. Even if you did really enjoy the game, there just isn’t a whole lot to keep you busy for very long here. The game will really only serve as a brief distraction and then after that it is time for the next title. So that will keep this game in the backseat for quite a while until they ever announce an update with more content.

The soundtrack isn’t bad at least. There isn’t much in the way of music but in the music portion all of the sounds are very familiar. That part feels very inviting at least. Meanwhile the graphics are good as well. It’s the Mario that you remember and it’s not like it suddenly looks low quality. So I have no negatives on that front but at the same time, it would be hard to mess up on a small game like this.

No replay value will also end up hurting this game bigtime as well. There just isn’t a whole lot for you to do here. I’m not even sure that this game would be something you could use to distract your kids since they would get bored too. I have high hopes that Mario Teaches Typing will not disappoint me the way that this one did. It’s no stretch to say that this is one of the weakest Mario games that I have ever played and that’s saying something!

Overall, Mario Paint is not quite the experience that I thought it would be. It is okay at best and unfortunately never manages to get beyond that. It’s not the kind of game that you will likely play for more than one hour unless you’re on a dare. If you have the Switch Online then you should definitely check it out since you will have access to this title. That said, you can really do a lot better with virtually any other Mario game. It’s no wonder why this one is so unknown. It just doesn’t have that usual 5 star seal of quality from Nintendo.

Overall 3/10