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Mario to Wario review

Game: Mario to Wario
Platform: SNES
Genre: Casual (Puzzle)
Developer: Game Freak

Reader review by goldenvortex

May 10, 2005

Princess Toadstool and Yoshi. With his new bi-plane, he decides to cause some mischief by dropping numerous objects on their heads and putting them on an obstacle course packed with tricks and traps. Blinded by this newly fixated object, our heroes rely on a fairy (who looks like a pink Link) to guide them through a variety of dangers that they encounter.

The game is compatible with the SNES mouse, a rare piece of hardware. You use the mouse to control the fairy, who can use her wand to zap enemies, turn box templates into solid blocks and destroy rocky boxes. Left clicking the mouse will get the fairy to cast her wand, performing those numerous afore mentioned tasks, right clicking will pause the game. You can pick form the three heroes, the only difference between the three is their speed. The princess is quite slow, Mario picks up the pace and Yoshi is always in a hurry.

Your character will have to aided constantly. They’ll walk forward with out stopping, they will turn direction if they hit a wall or if you clonk them on the head with your wand. Your character will have to guided up ladders, have templates turned into boxes to create pathways. Sometimes, the path will be littered with enemies, which can be killed with one quick wand smack. If an enemy hits you or if you fall into a pit of spikes, you’ll die instantly and will have to start the level afresh. You’ll have to be incredibly quick, if your character starts to wander off, he may end up stepping in something unpleasant. If you keep your eyes on the screen and your thinking cap on, the gate to success will open.

We have a hundred levels to conquer here, divided into ten worlds of ten levels. Each of them is littered with monsters, spikes and flying spike balls. The majority of the levels have the same type of obstacles; they have blocks that will only remain solid for a short time, rotating balls of spikes that move vertically or horizontally and grassy blocks that slow your character down. After a few levels, it gets a bit tiring because the majority of them lack creativity and are not exactly that challenging. You can even view the entire level before you start and plot your course from there. You have a three-minute time limit for the level but chances are that you won’t need it; it can take up to thirty seconds to clear a level. Even if you don’t plot your course, you’ll find that you’ll get to the exit (and a bored looking Luigi) in an instant.

There are varieties of items you can pick up on the course. Every level has five stars on it, which you can collect if you want. Collecting all five will reward you with an extra life. Later on, you will come across other Mario themed items such as mushrooms, which give you more time and coins, which do their standard Mario job. You can also collect coins by fighting Wario in the bonus stage, a game that is incredibly easy and very repetitive. When Wario flies past in his plane, you smack with your hammer by clicking on him. All you have to do his follow him and click like crazy, it’s not very fun and it’s not hard. He crops up at the end of each world with the same challenge and when he does, prepare for some rapid-fire finger pain.

Mario and Wario suffers from a small number of basic flaws. It gets old fast because it’s not hard at all. The huge amount of levels isn’t that necessary as by the time you finish world four, you know that you’re not going to get any more fun from the title. The boss levels are a joke and if you don’t have the ultra-rare Snes mouse, you’ll find the controls a little clunky with a joy pad. If we had a few more game modes here, it would probably increase playability. A race mode or a record breaker would have been some great additions but all we got were one hundred easy and repetitive levels to crawl through. It’s something that hardcore Lemmings fans may enjoy but for the rest of us, it merely provides us with some fun for about five minutes until we find something better to do with our lives.

Rating: 3/10

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