Hands-on with Mario Golf: World Tour on 3DS

Mario Golf: World Tour is a surprisingly deep and challenging golf sim for a game where a chimpanzee and a ghost can tee off on an underwater 18-hole course.

But that has always been the secret of this series, hasn't it?

Nintendo has always managed to strike a balance between faithfully representing the sport and letting in some of the colourful, cartoony Mario zaniness that made you choose this over Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge in the first place.

It has been a decade since the last time we joined Mario on the green. With this new 3DS version out in just over a month, then, we wanted to know what's new and what's been improved in the last ten years.

The actual golf will be familiar to anyone who has played a previous Mario Golf game or Everybody's Golf on PS Vita.

On each hole, you are given a recommended club and are pointed in the general direction of the pin. You can get quite far by just hitting swing over and over until you get the ball into the hole - complete with a satisfying thunk.

To stay under par, though, and score a few birdies, you'll need to apply a little more thought. You need to account for wind - whether that's the lazy breeze on the forest course or the hurricane blasts on the mountain - and terrain.

You also need to decide when to use your power shots. Plus, there's manual control. This lets you determine where you'll hit the ball (letting you hit curved or arcing shots), and lets you apply topspin or backspin to affect the bounce of the ball after it lands.

To balance it out, you run the risk when using manual shots of fluffing your hit entirely and knocking the ball about like you're throwing an envelope into the wind.

But you will need to think about this stuff. That's because Mario Golf: World Tour can be fiendishly difficult, and cute rotund Mario becomes a ruthless golfing rival whose name you will scream out at the top of your lungs as he soars up the leaderboard.

Getting all three trophies in the main game requires incredible accuracy, pretty much zero tolerance for failure, and a handful of birdies. It is, of course, as satisfying as hell when you finally do win, of course. Eat that, plumber boy.

Mario Golf: World Tour is largely split into three main areas. Firstly, there's the Castle Club. Here, you play as your Mii and get to explore a cute hub world as you work through three devilishly tough tournaments.

There are also a few secrets to find, and a number of difficult challenges. In one, you have to make nine one-hit, one-putt holes in a row without a single error. This is one of the most challenging events in a golf game... ever.

There's loads of stuff to find (I'm ten hours in and still unlocking new courses and characters). Annoyingly, though, there isn't an easy way to track your trophies or completed events.

Then, there's your usual selection of quick round modes. These come with tactical items, like bullet bills that send your ball straight forward, ice flowers that let you bounce off water, and bob-ombs that fire your ball into the air. You can turn these off, mind.

You also get to play on the more ridiculous Mario world courses, such as Yoshi Lake (with its bouncy trampoline platforms) or the microscopic Wriggler Park (with its Godzilla-sized Mario villains).

You can play single-player or with pals (online or off, but no pass-the-3DS mode). The servers are offline, though, so we couldn't test the multiplayer.

Finally, and best of all, there are the challenges.

These give you quick-fire goals to achieve like hitting your ball through giant gold hoops, collecting coins that are scattered around the course, completing a few holes in 120 seconds, or finishing a short course with a random selection of clubs.

They're lots of fun, often have an element of puzzle solving, and regularly take place on only one to three holes so are perfect for playing on-the-go.

So, that's Mario Golf: World Tour. Nothing massively new, but a fresh entry in a favourite franchise that's filled with stuff to do, has loads of content to unlock, and looks utterly gorgeous. This could easily be the best Mario Golf game yet.

We'll find out for sure in a month. It's out everywhere on May 2nd.