Mario Party: Island Tour:[a] is a party video game developed by NDcube and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. The third handheld game in the Mario Party series, it was announced by Satoru Iwata in a Nintendo Direct presentation[5] in April 2013,[6] and was released in November 2013 in North America, in January 2014 in Europe and Australia, and in March 2014 in Japan. The game features seven boards,[4] each with their own special features, and 81 new minigames.[7] It was followed by Mario Party 10 for the Wii U in 2015.Island Tour received "mixed" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.[9] In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of all four eights, for a total of 32 out of 40.
GameRevolution: praised the 7 new boards and boss minigames; however, the repetitive gameplay, character voices and board music were criticized.[13] GamesRadar said, "Island Tour isn't the Mario Party you remember, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. That said, there are definitely some missing pieces that keep it from being a memorable entry in the franchise." GameSpot commended the game's usage of four-player local download play, great minigame designs, and also Island Tour's single-player mode, but criticized "a few bad games in the bunch", and the lack of online play