The Super Mario Bros. franchise is synonymous with 2D platformers, but Mario himself has ventured into other video game genres, including fighting games, JRPGs, educational games, and even terrible movies. Now one fan has taken Mario into a genre he's never explored before: first-person shooters.
During this Mario Day, fan Sean Noonan shared his reimaging of the original Super Mario Bros. game as a first-person shooter made in Unreal Engine 4. The result is a pretty awesome mix of classic Super Mario gameplay and old school shooters like Doom and Unreal Tournament.
This Mario FPS game (dubbed The Super 1-1 Challenge) is a fantastic reimagining of level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros., perhaps even better than the one made in Fortnite. Originally created for the Mapcore Monthly Discord Challenge, this fan game is a time trial where the aim is to collect all the gold and red coins as quickly as possible. With 160 gold coins and 8 red coins hidden throughout the level, it will take quite a bit of trial and error to find them all, and even longer to map out the fastest route to all of them.
Though this is a first-person shooter, it's still a Super Mario Bros. game, so Mario isn't shooting up the Mushroom Kingdom with a machine gun or shotgun. Instead, he's got a much kid-friendlier plunger-gun, which ties in nicely to his plumber persona and is still an effective weapon against the Goombas found throughout the game world. Players can also collect mushrooms to upgrade their gun, increasing distance and gaining the ability to break blocks. There is also quite a bit of first person platforming, creating a unique hybrid of Super Mario 64 exploration mixed with Quake and Unreal Tournament's quick and floaty running and jumping mechanics.
Players can also collect the famous Super Star, which feels a lot like a power-up from Doom, with players running faster and insta-killing any Goombas they run into. The placing for where some of the red coins and power-ups are hidden also feel a lot like searching for the secrets in Doom, as players have to explore every nook and cranny if they want to collect all the coins. This game should provide a great new challenge to all those Super Mario Bros. speedrunners.
This game is so amazing, it's a shame that Nintendo will probably never even consider making a Mario FPS. It has the perfect mix of Super Mario cheerfulness with all the action and exploration from old school PC shooters (minus the violence). Likely one of the best Super Mario Bros. fan games ever made, it's one every fan should play at least once, before Nintendo hits it with a cease and desist.
Source: IGN