It takes a while to open up the whole map, but it all links together very well and is crammed full of enjoyably well-hidden secrets. The area of Lake Lapcat contains several islands, which in other games would be separate worlds you access from a central hub but here you just swim across to them – ideally on the back of Plessie the plesiosaur. However, unlike any other Mario game you’re running around a single open world environment. It shares the same obsession with cats (a cat suit that lets you climb up walls is one of the major power-ups in both) and a few enemies and boss battles but is otherwise entirely its own thing.Īnd by that we mean you have full freedom of movement and camera control, the same as Odyssey and completely different to 3D World.
To head off such complaints the original Super Mario 3D World is accompanied by a second brand-new game, called Bowser’s Fury. This even includes the Captain Toad levels, as unnecessary as that seems, and the collectable stamps that were once used in Miiverse have now been repurposed to make them available in a new photo mode.Īlthough the game is stacked full of things to do, and will last any player a dozen or so hours, many will no doubt balk at the idea of being charged full price for what is not far off from a straight port. There’s no substantial new content in the Switch version of the game but you do have the welcome new option of four-player online co-op, as well as just local. The original intention was no doubt to make a more accessible style of 3D Mario game, when compared to the then recent Super Mario Galaxy titles, and to move beyond the deeply conservative New Super Mario Bros. Neither game really has a plot but most stages in both use a semi-fixed camera view (you can move it a bit, but you never have to) where you have full freedom of movement but only within the game’s purposefully small environments.
The only similar game is Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS, to which this is nominally a sequel. Super Mario 3D World though is one of the crown jewels, one of the best games on the Wii U and a clever halfway house between the 2D Mario games and 3D titles like Super Mario Odyssey. After this, there’s really only Xenoblade Chronicles X left that is universally loved (we quite liked Star Fox Zero but nobody else seemed to), before you start scraping the bottom of the barrel. Previously they’ve been able to use Wii U ports to paper over gaps in the Nintendo Switch’s release schedule but that well has now almost run dry.