Review: Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 (DS)

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

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Good: Level editor, wi-fi sharing, some clever stages

Bad: Somewhat awkward control, length, easy difficulty

Donkey Kong: Serial rapist

Remember Pauline? If you’re under the age of 20, you probably don’t. Before Princess Peach (hell, even before she went by Princess Toadstool), Mario’s love was a personality-free, vaguely feminine bunch of pixels named Pauline. Well, once again, she’s been kidnapped by a giant ape in a red tie.

Sequel to the GBA game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 has many new opportunities thanks to the DS touchscreen. Unfortunately, this results in slightly more frustration than innovation. Tapping the Mini-Mario toys will start and stop them, and you can change their direction with swipes of the stylus. It’s also possible to jump and manipulate objects in the environment.

Your end goal is to get all the Mini-Marios to the goal in as little time as possible. If this sounds like Lemmings, there’s a good reason why. It really does feel a lot like that classic title, just with less control over your Marios actions. With Lemmings, you could make them dig, climb, bomb, and countless other actions. Mini-Marios feature far less variety.

It’s actually very easy to get the Mini-Marios to the goal on each level. The real challenge lies in getting all the items within the stage, including cards and coins. Bronze, Silver, and Gold awards are given out depending on your score.

After finishing one of the worlds (consisting of 9 levels with a similar theme), you fight the big simian himself. These are the only real non-puzzle elements of the game, and are actually pretty fun. There are many variations, but most involve Mario on the bottom shooting Mini-Marios at DK on the top screen.

One of the coolest features of MVDK2 is the level editor, and its ability to use wi-fi. After you finish worlds, you unlock their tool sets for use in the editor. It’s very easy to put together stages using the stylus, and they can be uploaded via wi-fi for other gamers to try out.

Graphically, it certainly doesn’t push the limits of the DS hardware by any means, but it still has that vivid, colorful Mario feel. Most of the audio is fairly bland, but there are some nice remixes of classic Mario and DK tracks.

Overall, MVDK2 is a nice puzzler, but is more frustrating and offers less than Lemmings. The level editor is nice, but the easy difficulty and length of the game are certainly drawbacks.

Graphics: 7.0

Sound: 6.5

First Play: 7.5

Replay Value: 7.5

Gameplay: 7.6

Overall: 7.7

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Review: Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 (DS)

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