Genre: Action/Puzzle
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
Price: 29.99 USD
US Release Date: September 25, 2006
Equipment: Nintendo DS Lite
Completion: 7.4 of 8 levels, approximately 5 hours.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong. A classic struggle, now on the small screen. Who will win? My money's on Mario.
You control Mario. Or rather, you control miniature toy versions of Mario, using the stylus and the touch screen. On any given stage, you'll have control over 1-4 toy Marios. You'll encounter some standard Mario series baddies: shyguys, pipe plants, bloopers, and of course, Donkey Kong himself, who shows up at the end of each level as the boss.
The object of each stage is to get the Mario toys to the Goal door, preferably one right after the other in a chain in order to rack up big points. It's kind of a puzzle game, and kind of an action game. The trick is figuring out the correct strategy to get all your Mario toys to the door quickly, in a chain, and without stopping them once they start. Each stage can be completed fairly quickly once you figure out the strategy, which can take a few tries. There are 9 stages per level, plus a bonus minigame (Whack-A-Shyguy), and the boss fight with DK. There are a total of 8 levels, one final boss fight, and an extra Basement level with two stages and two unlockable boss fights.
With any DS game, the touch-screen gameplay is make or break. It works here, for the most part. Tap a Mario toy to start it walking, slide across the toy to change direction, slide up to make it jump, slide down to enter pipes, or tap again to stop it walking. Everything else that can be manipulated, like switches and blocks, are controlled with the stylus. While simple, the controls get the job done.
However, the control scheme is not without its flaws. All the stages are too big to fit on a single screen, so there's always scrolling involved. One problem is that sometimes the screen will scroll to follow one Mario toy while you're trying to control another Mario toy, and your instructions are ignored. That might not sound like a big problem, but when it happens often enough that it causes you to restart the stage because a Mario toy saunters off a cliff, it's a big enough problem. The toys will also bump into each other and change direction, which is a massive pain if two are going left, and the other two going right. They'll rebound off each other multiple times and end up going the complete wrong direction you need them to. A quick swipe of the stylus will send them in the correct direction, but many of the levels have such small walkways that a toy will plummet to its doom while you're attempting to sort them all out.
Control issues aside, the game looks nice. The art is clean and simple, just like any other Mario game. The intro cutscene is fancy full-motion CG, and there are similar CG still-shot bumpers for the boss fights. The in-game graphics are on par with a typical side-scroller from the PSX era.
Music and sound is typical Mario fare. I don't remember when Mario started talking (perhaps it was with Super Mario 64?), but his voice is the same. "It'sa me, Mario!" Fun fact: if you close the DS to put the game in sleep mode, Mario will say, "I love-a this game!" with an echo as if he's in a tunnel.
Each level has a theme, like a tropical island, magnetic walls and floors, or lava and fire. The game autosaves after you complete any given stage. There's a score tally at the end of each stage that includes the coins you collected in that stage, as well as bonuses for time, chains, and continuous movement. Based on the final score, a bronze, silver, or gold star is awarded. Stars are awarded for the DK fights, as well. After completing the entire game, a bonus is given for getting all bronze, silver, or gold stars.
As the game progresses, the difficulty increases at an even pace, while never getting too hard. If a stage is challenging, studying it for a while before trying again is usually all that's needed to pass it. Each level brings new enemies, and new obstacles that must be overcome, which helps keep the action fresh.
Besides the single player campaign mode, there is an editor mode where players can build their own stages to play. The main game unlocks toolsets to use in the editor. You can choose a premade template, or start from scratch, but you can go nuts in the editor building a devious stage that can then be sent to friends over Wi-Fi.
Mario and puzzle fans alike can find something to like in Mario vs Donkey Kong 2. It's probably most closely compared to Lemmings, although it involves a bit less strategy and a bit more action. While it may not be a game to sit and play for hours on end, it's fun to pick up and play a stage or three here and there.
Heath Says:
Mario vs DK 2 is a fine rental, but I wouldn't want to spend 30 bucks on it. It's too short, and I still got bored before I was finished. Certain stages were challenging, but I feel like I breezed through them without much trouble. I can't get over the control issues I encountered, either. It was usually the controls that prevented me from completing a stage on the first try. I knew what I needed to do, but couldn't do it without Mario toys bouncing off each other, or not doing what I told them to. I don't regret playing it, and I think most people would enjoy it, but it just wasn't for me.
Final Verdict:
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