Cookies are pretty damn great, aren’t they? They are a nice, delicious treat that is good to have every once and a while, and there are so many different kinds of cookies out there that you could have! Snickerdoodle, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, and even the good ol’ classic, chocolate chip, all great choices. And you know what’s even better than cookies in general? Why, video games about cookies, of course! Or at least, I would assume they are, cause I haven’t played any games relating to cookies myself. That is, except for one off the top of my head, one that has been nagging at the back of my mind for quite some time now. So please, ladies and gentlemen, grab your favorite type of cookie and join me, as we take a look at Yoshi’s Cookie today.

When it comes to Yoshi’s first outing into the puzzle genre, being with the game simply called Yoshi, it was one of the most mid-puzzle games that I had ever played in my life. Sure, it was fun for a good couple of minutes, and seeing all the different types of Yoshis was adorable, but it didn’t offer anything more than that for me to consider playing it for more than 10 minutes at a time. But hey, I guess it was successful enough to where Nintendo figured they may as well keep the puzzle train rolling, and they would do this by completely transforming another game called Hermetica when it came to consoles. As a result, we would get Yoshi’s Cookie, which when compared to Yoshi is… yet another middle-of-the-road puzzler. It was still a good game, and it has the same charm and appeal as Yoshi for the NES did, but it also suffers from the same problem as that game at the same time.

The graphics are pretty appealing, being pretty bright and colorful not just in terms of the cookies, but also the locations and characters that you see, even if they are ripped straight from Mario World, the music is good, being pretty upbeat, yet fast enough to where it really gets you in the mood to do some real puzzling, the control is… somewhat odd, but you can get used to it pretty quickly and get to puzzling just fine, and the gameplay is also pretty confusing on the surface level, but once you properly get into it, you’ll be clearing those cookies out like no one else can.

The game is a tile-matching puzzle game, where you take control of NOT Yoshi, but Mario instead, because that makes plenty of sense, go through many different stages and rounds through plenty of different locations, move around the cookies in a grid to match up the same cookies to clear them from the grid, have new rows of cookies come from both the top and right of the screen so that you can have better luck at clearing out the cookies, and wonder why the hell you are still playing the game after, say, one or two worlds of doing this shit. A lot of it is what you would expect from your typical puzzle game, with some twists added in to make it a little more original, but it doesn’t really offer too much else from what you are initially presented. That being said, it can still be fun.

Like with Yoshi, this game does offer you the choice of what round you want to take on, along with how fast the cookies come in and what music plays throughout the game, so you can make it so that you can either have a complete and easy playthrough of simple cookie matching, or one of the most fast and intense session of cookie matching that you will ever have in your sad, pathetic life, and it works well enough on all the settings, although for me, the slow and medium settings are a liiiiiiitle too slow, especially if you are going to go in from the beginning. Aside from that though, also like with Yoshi, there are several other modes that you can try out just in case you get bored with the main mode, such as a VS Mode, where you can compete against another player or a CPU, and a Puzzle Mode, where you are given a set grid of cookies to work with, and you just have to make sure you clear them all out. Like with the main mode, these modes are pretty typical for this kind of game, and they work well enough, giving you enough to work and have fun with, especially when you have a friend along with you.

Unfortunately though, despite all of that, this game does suffer from the exact same problem that Yoshi did, which drags it down way too much: it gets boring after a while. Sure, the game can be fun for a good little bit, I would say around 10 minutes or so, but there isn’t much else here that would make me stick with it for more than just that. You could get more out of the game with a friend, but then again, I’m pretty sure you all wouldn’t play the game for that much longer. I wish I could say more to its benefit, but really, there isn’t anything more I can say, as it isn’t as addicting as Tetris or Dr. Mario, and the concept isn’t inventive or inviting enough to keep players matching for hours on end like they envisioned it to.

Overall, despite the fun enough concept and having plenty of modes to play around with, Yoshi’s Cookie is yet another “whatever” puzzler, one that can provide plenty of fun for a good bit, with or without a friend, but not only is there nothing here to make me wanna play through it for hours on end, but there’s also nothing here to make me want to come back either. I would recommend it for those who loved Yoshi, as well as those who are big puzzle fanatics, but for those who aren’t into either of those, then you are much better off with any other puzzle game aside from this. Kinda sucks though that this would be the last Yoshi puzzle game, as I think they could potentially make a really great one if they had a fun enough concept, but that probably will never be the case. And no, I don’t count Tetris Attack as a Yoshi puzzle game. Just because it has Yoshis in it doesn’t automatically make it a Yoshi game, despite what childhood you wants to think.

Game #489