Dr Mario World
Android, iOS
The seemingly infinite world map, the power-ups, the twin currencies and match-three gameplay: there’s no mistaking it. Here is proof, if you still needed it, that we are living in the darkest timeline. The year is 2019, and Nintendo has cloned Candy Crush Saga.
As with Candy Crush, there’s the seed of a decent game in here. The traditional Dr Mario pattern of play has been inverted, and subverted. Rather than match pellets that fall from the top of the screen, you swipe them up from the bottom with your thumb. There’s no time pressure either, at least on normal stages – incoming pellets are stored at the bottom of the screen, allowing you time to plan your move. And while things escalate in the Candy Crush style – viruses that must be matched twice, then three times before they disappear, and so on – there are some nice touches as you progress. Realising that you’re able to steer loose halfpills, and they can be pushed through seemingly impassable blocks, are pleasant eureka moments.
Sadly, as with Candy Crush, there are problems everywhere around them. Hearts are the game’s energy system, limiting how much you can play unless you either pay or beg Facebook friends for a re-up. You’ll earn one each time you clear a stage for the first time,
but difficulty spikes and timed challenges are designed to clean you out. A half-hour recharge time, intended to make you get your wallet out, instead pushes you away.
Then there are diamonds, the premium currency used for heart refills, power-up purchases and recruiting staff through the game’s gacha system. You pick one doctor, who has a unique skill with a charge time proportionate to its power – Bowser’s, which clears two random rows, takes an age to come up, but Toad’s destruction of ten random spaces is frequently available. Assistants offer tiny buffs, or small chances of bigger ones: the goomba raises your score by a percentage point, though that, and the doctors’ cooldowns, can be improved by levelling them up with duplicate rolls.
There’s a troubling whiff of pay-to-win – there’s no other way to power up your team – but in fairness the game is built on it, forever offering brute-force solutions in exchange for a few minutes alone with your credit card. But nothing is worth spending money on. Nice as it is to see a Mario favourite in a lab coat, the random nature of skills mean they’re no more likely to cure you than they are to finish you off. Assistant buffs are either similarly random or so slender as to not be noticeable. Even rolling for new characters fails to set the pulse racing. That’s a damning failure for a gacha game, though it’s just one of many afflictions blighting Nintendo’s most boring smartphone outing so far.