This review contains spoilers
someday they'll stop tying game shifting difficulty elements to the characters you can choose from...
played through the game 100%ing everything until i got to the seventh special stage where i just decided i didn't care anymore and left it. wasn't sitting my ass through a stage built around the goomba powerup, i refuse.
generally enjoyable/pleasant (which is a given, there's pretty much a solid floor that a Mario platformer will sit at quality wise and only sink below if something went horribly wrong) but not as exciting as i had hoped otherwise. honestly i'm not feeling this as the massive departure from the NSMB line of games that others did. at least not in terms of the soundtrack (still not too great) and sometimes aesthetics.
the wonder flowers are nice to start with but once you've done a couple, you've seen most of what it has to offer and there's a ton to come. it's nice that sometimes levels can go in a completely different direction than what one would expect going in but some of the collecting focused ones or the top down movement shifts weren't my faves. elsewhere the shift back towards more of an exploration focus like in World vs the straight platforming was also a nice change of pace when the game made use of secret exits every so often.
not sure how i feel about the game structurally. the base games + the smaller challenge levels built around the badges + the occasional combat challenge set-up feels very similar to Kirby and the Forgotten Land (not in gameplay itself obviously) and it ends up feeling a bit homogenized? not something that i'm holding against the game or anything just a thought i had, i guess i'm more used to the scattered games that i'd play on nintendo platforms feeling less structurally similar even when on the same platforms. this does switch it up a bit with some of things like the hidden object stages but i didn't care for those as much.
glad i gave this a go but i don't think it will stand out massively among my faves in the series or among platformers at large. sometimes it's nice to just have a bit of a meat and potatoes experience though and this was def one of those.
played through the game 100%ing everything until i got to the seventh special stage where i just decided i didn't care anymore and left it. wasn't sitting my ass through a stage built around the goomba powerup, i refuse.
generally enjoyable/pleasant (which is a given, there's pretty much a solid floor that a Mario platformer will sit at quality wise and only sink below if something went horribly wrong) but not as exciting as i had hoped otherwise. honestly i'm not feeling this as the massive departure from the NSMB line of games that others did. at least not in terms of the soundtrack (still not too great) and sometimes aesthetics.
the wonder flowers are nice to start with but once you've done a couple, you've seen most of what it has to offer and there's a ton to come. it's nice that sometimes levels can go in a completely different direction than what one would expect going in but some of the collecting focused ones or the top down movement shifts weren't my faves. elsewhere the shift back towards more of an exploration focus like in World vs the straight platforming was also a nice change of pace when the game made use of secret exits every so often.
not sure how i feel about the game structurally. the base games + the smaller challenge levels built around the badges + the occasional combat challenge set-up feels very similar to Kirby and the Forgotten Land (not in gameplay itself obviously) and it ends up feeling a bit homogenized? not something that i'm holding against the game or anything just a thought i had, i guess i'm more used to the scattered games that i'd play on nintendo platforms feeling less structurally similar even when on the same platforms. this does switch it up a bit with some of things like the hidden object stages but i didn't care for those as much.
glad i gave this a go but i don't think it will stand out massively among my faves in the series or among platformers at large. sometimes it's nice to just have a bit of a meat and potatoes experience though and this was def one of those.