Yesterday I caught a glimpse of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and was able to put my hands on the game for around 20 minutes with a developer and a couple other DigitalChumps editors in multiplayer. While I wasn’t able to get through the entire demo in that time period, I thought I’d report back here with my impressions anyway to update you guys on my thoughts about the game so far.
First off, graphically, it’s as expected. It isn’t stunningly gorgeous or anything like that, but it does employ the usual parallax scrolling techniques and all that jazz. I’m personally pretty taken by 2.5-D presentation, so to me, it’s attractive anyhow.
The gameplay is quite similar to that of the DS version, though with this time, obviously the focus is heavily on “co-op” multiplayer. I enclose that in quotations because it’s just as easy to be a hindrance to your peers; you can pick them up by holding down 1 and then shaking the Wii remote, after which you can toss them around. You can also bounce off their heads to jump higher and collect coins dangling overhead and even scroll the screen to kill stragglers. It’s actually a lot of fun with three to four players, and it’s quite challenging even if everyone happens to cooperate.
There were ten levels available in the demo; we tried five of them today, and will play the other five tomorrow. You may have seen video of them on the ‘net already (ours in HD will be up soon), but we’ll highlight some of our favorite aspects of the ones we experienced.
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Yoshi, who can eat berries and even eat/spit back out fireballs from your buddies
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A propeller suit with which you can shake the Wii remote to sail upward and hover downward more slowly at whichever angle you desire
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A penguin suit which allows 2-D sliding down hills and through obstacles that is full of win… plus, you can shoot ice balls at enemies to turn them into scalable platforms sort of like the enemies in Super Mario Bros 2.
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Moving walls and platforms in the dungeon level, a la Super Mario World.
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The return of one of the Koopa Kids at the end of the castle level
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Over 80 levels total in the final game… sweet.
The whole experience simply smacks of Four Swords Adventures all over again, and we’re perfectly fine with that. The only problem with it as far as we can see thus far is that the levels are precisely the same in single-player as they are with four players. That means that they’re probably nowhere near as fun with only one player, so if you’re considering this game for the single-player experience, you might not want to expect the same type of entertainment you’d find in any of the classic Super Mario titles.
Either way, though, we won’t know for certain until the final game releases, so stay tuned for more coverage from us as soon as it becomes available. And watch for our HD video footage to go live as soon as our sleepless nights ahead allow for it!
