PC & console game reviews
WII U’S CROWN JEWEL FINALLY SWITCHES TEAMS.
Nintendo Switch | $79.95 | www.nintendo.com/
THERE’S SOMETHING ODDLY transgressive about Mario Maker. After over 30 years stomping Goombas in carefully designed and refined Super Mario Bros. levels, the opportunity to take the reins comes with a strange sense of power. With every utterly ridiculous corruption of Nintendo’s famously breezy platformer, with every gargantuansized Thwomp placed maliciously and secretly at the end of a marathon level, Mario Maker can feel like breaking into school at the weekend and wreaking havoc in the canteen.
Nintendo isn’t so reckless as to leave the keys in the door and turn the other way: one of the greatest improvements this sequel has over its predecessor is a full-length, Nintendo made campaign of levels that are not only fun to play, but provide a crash course in all the clever things it’s possible to do with the very snazzy editor. While veterans of the original Wii U Mario Maker are likely to skip this, it stands as the most innovative (and weird) single-player 2D Mario game since The Lost Levels. Given the focus of Mario Maker 2, it shows Nintendo daring to experiment and get silly with its approach to 2D level design.
Because overall, Nintendo must understand that Mario Maker is a fairly ‘hardcore’ game by the measure of Mario games. Endless Mode returns, which allows players to tackle an endless stream of user-created levels on three difficulty tiers, but these tend to be either frivolously easy or else very hard. There are exceptions of course (there are already thousands of levels and counting) and it’s easy to skip levels if they’re either boring or tedious. But if you’re after a guaranteed good time and you’re not interested in level creation, perhaps you’ll want to stick to Nintendo’s campaign.
Mario Maker is about its community, and the meta-game is trying to make your own creations ‘go viral’. The toolset is remarkably easy to use, but the real challenge is understanding what makes a good level tick. Given Mario’s moveset, and given the five game templates ( Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros U and 3D World), as well as the various costumes and alternative characters (Toad is a highlight, of course), there’s a lot to get one’s head around. And if you have no luck making levels that gain a foothold in the community, it’s a pleasure to create them anyway.
Still, Nintendo’s discoverability is obscure to say the least, and the most popular courses tend to be either novelties (such as auto-run levels) or very challenging courses uploaded by the first game’s veterans. That’s at the time of writing, and is likely to change. But it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling left out, given the presence of Nintendo’s own campaign, the accessibility of its creation tools, and the sheer pleasure in commanding Mario: even if you’re commanding him through levels that’d make Salvador Dali feel shy.