Yoshi’s New Island? I’ve got the distinct feeling that this is just the old island with a new lick of paint and some of the fun missing.
Yoshi’s New Island: On the plus side
Yoshi’s New Island makes me feel old. It’s taken me a while, and a bit of gameplay to work out why that might be.
It’s essentially because there’s part of my brain that refuses to let the idea go that Yoshi’s Island — the SNES original that you can’t play on a 3DS unless you were an early “ambassador” for the system — is a relatively new game, because it came out so late in the lifespan of the SNES.
Yep, I’m that old.
I had to go and look it up to confirm it, and Yoshi’s Island came out in 1995, nearly twenty years ago. It’s not “new” in any real sense, but then again, Yoshi’s New Island, the current generation remix of what I guess I should resignedly call a “classic” isn’t an entirely new game either.
Instead, it takes the core concepts of the classic title, gives them a very slight 3D rewash and presents much the same charming gameplay as the original.
The story is relatively simple; Baby Mario and Luigi are on their way to being delivered by the stork (meaning this is as close to actual ess-eee-exx you’ll ever get referenced in a Nintendo game) are once again threatened by the evil Kamek, and it’s up Yoshi — or more accurately, the entire community of multi-coloured Yoshis — to see them safely back to their parents. Baby Luigi has already been snatched, though, so the task ahead of Yoshi is a daunting one.
Yoshi is, as he always was, more or less indestructible, with the only things that can defeat him being spikes and botttomless pits. Get Yoshi hit, however, and Baby Mario flies off his back and starts screaming, which attracts Kamek. You’ve got a limited number of seconds to get Mario back onto Yoshi before he’s whisked away and you lose a life and have to try again.
Logically my brain wants to say that should be perma-death city, because Baby Mario is what Kamek’s after all along, but then this is a Nintendo platform game. Super-hard difficulty was never on the cards.
It’s a platform game in a mostly-classic Mario style, but where those games were strongly focused on time and efficiency, there’s a sense of exploration in Yoshi’s New Island, with flowers, time stars and red coins to collect in every single level. Yoshi also gains the ability to transform into multiple vehicles in specific levels controlled largely with tilt, although these are fairly short and uneventful. If you don’t like jumping and exploring, this won’t be the game for you.
Yoshi’s New Island: On the minus side
Yoshi’s New Island is a very polished title, which you’d expect out of Nintendo, but it’s not without its flaws.
To face the most pressing one, if, like me you’re a more seasoned gamer, then you’ve played it before in much the same style. As with so many 3DS platform games, the 3D effect adds absolutely nothing to to the gameplay, and I’d strongly argue that the vehicle sections in the original were superior to the tilt-based versions in the “New” Island.
There’s also a few things that haven’t been addressed from the original game. The art style and most of the music is excellent, but I’m not a fan of the sound effects. Baby Mario’s cry is terribly effective at being annoying — it is, after all a baby’s cry, and if you can’t react to that you simply have no soul — but it is still exceptionally irritating. As such, I’m less fussed about losing a level, especially because lives are plentiful when Baby Mario gets hit as I am about having to put up with his screaming all the time. Irritation isn’t the same thing as tension.
More like “Meh-icle” section.
(Better caption writer urgently needed. No reasonable offer refused.)
Equally, Yoshi’s exertion noises make it sound like he’s a very constipated dinosaur, and once you’ve had that thought, you can never go back again. So… um… sorry for putting that thought in your head. Misery loves company, right?
I’m also horribly confused about the lifecycle of Yoshis. They come out of eggs, but these can be laid by Yoshis by eating enemies, or spat out of plants. Except for enemies that can’t be eaten, or the massive eggs that are used to crush specific parts of levels. Presumably some Yoshis are in fact sterile, otherwise we’d be hip deep in the things by now.
Yoshi’s New Island: Pricing
Yoshi’s New Island sells as a cartridge for $59.95, which is what EB Games lists it for at the time of writing; JB Hi-Fi has it slightly cheaper at $54. It’s also available as a download from the eShop for a flat $59.95.
Yoshi’s New Island: Fat Duck verdict
Yoshi’s New Island is a perfectly competent platform game with a fair amount of polish, but I can’t say that I’m entirely smitten with it the way I usually am with most Mario platformers.
That’s mostly because there’s really not that much that is all that “new” about it, and within that context it suffers by comparison to Yoshi’s “Old” Island.
It is notably tricky to play on that old island on a 3DS unless you bought a 3DS at launch and got Nintendo’s “Ambassador” pack. Clearly it could be offered via eShop at least, but Nintendo shows no signs of actually doing that.
Within that context, if you’ve got access to the original game, that’s the one that I’d still be more inclined to play, but that aside, while there are more gripping platform games for the 3DS — even some bearing the Mario name — Yoshi’s New Island is what I’d call mid-range fun.
While playing, I kept waiting to be hooked enough to go back and get every last flower and coin, but while it was fun enough to play, that never really happened. I can’t say that it’s a bad platform game, and it’s a genre I’m usually easily enamoured with, but Yoshi’s New Island both never felt that fun, or that gripping.