I only got to play three holes in Mario Golf: World Tour last week, but it was enough of a taste to make me salivate for when I can tackle all the courses and content the next Camelot-developed 3DS game has to offer.

I tackled the challenging Yoshi Lake course alongside NWR’s Josh Max and Justin Berube and Nintendo’s Corey Olcsvary (you might remember him as the Human Pikmin in his pre-Nintendo days) using World Tour’s simultaneous local multiplayer. It allows everyone to play a hole at the same time, while still keeping tabs on how everyone else is doing. You can taunt in a manner that is just shy of being as obnoxious as Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour’s taunting. Players do have to wait for everyone to finish the current hole before they can move on, but that just gives people more of a venue for taunting. The pace is kept up, and there was rarely downtime. The one bummer with this stellar local multiplayer mode is that everyone needs their own copy. There is no Download Play to be had here.

Swinging has two styles to choose from, with an Easy mode letting players just time the swing to set their length. The Manual mode, which will be preferred by veteran Mario Golf players, brings the fine-tuned controls that have made Mario Golf so much fun over the years. You press A once to start the swing, then set your length and your draw/fade with subsequent button presses. You can also pick where you strike the golf ball on the touch screen while setting topspin or backspin with button presses. It’s intuitive and fun, with enough challenge that you can’t sleepwalk through holes.

Adding to the mayhem are items, which can be used in lieu of a normal shot. In Yoshi Lake, water is all over the place. So, using the Ice Flower lets your ball freeze the water as it lands, preventing a hazardous follow-up shot. I also saw a Fire Flower that cuts through any obstacles, a Bob-Omb that gives you an added boost, and a Bullet Bill that ignores wind and obstacles and flies in a straight line. You can turn them off if you want to, but it’s a nice twist that makes the golfing feel distinctly Mario, but not in a manner that compromises the nature of the sport.

It’s been nearly two years since Camelot’s last 3DS title Mario Tennis Open came out, and while I did enjoy it, I had big issues with it. Tennis Open lacked a strong single-player component and the online was shoddy. At face value, Nintendo and Camelot took those critiques to heart because World Tour is fixing to clean up both aspects, though we haven’t seen it all in action quite yet.

The single-player is focused on Castle Club, which seems to be a wonderful evolution of Tennis Open’s barebones experience. Playing as your Mii, you move around the golf club, competing in tournaments, upgrading your gear, and interacting with Nintendo characters. According to the Nintendo representative, it won’t be quite to the degree of the RPG modes in the Game Boy Color and Advance Mario sports titles, but it’s far more in that direction than Tennis Open was.

The online, on paper, sounds like it’ll feature tournaments where you can enter at your leisure as well as communities where you can set your own rules similarly to Mario Kart 7. There’s substantial potential to the online here, and I hope it works well.

Mario Golf: World Tour launches on 3DS on May 2 in North America and Europe, and May 1 in Japan.