REVIEW

Yoshi’s Crafted World Review

by Rob Pritchard, April 28th, 2019

For many years, Nintendo have created several franchises to accommodate to every kind of gamer. The Yoshi series, which began as a sequel to the legendary Super Mario World, is an example of a platformer that combines cute visuals with easy to learn and hard to master gameplay mechanics. After being teased at E3 in 2017, Yoshi has now arrived on the Nintendo Switch in an adventure titled Yoshi’s Crafted World. All that remains to be asked is if the green dinosaur’s new adventure a finely crafted masterpiece, or if the game needs to be taken back to the old chalk drawing board.

After the gems that power the mystical Sundream Stone of Yoshi Island are stolen by the evil Baby Bowser and his loyal minion Kamek, it is up to the Yoshis to retrieve them before their home loses its creative power. Instead of rigidly sticking to the 2D plane as in previous titles, Yoshi’s Crafted World shifts into the 2.5D plane, allowing you to interact with the environment to solve puzzles and find rare artefacts to earn bonus items to add to your collection. This expansion certainly works to the game’s advantage, allowing new types of puzzles that work in a 3D space. One of the highlights of these are timer based enemy defeat challenges that will require pin point accuracy to complete successfully.

The gameplay of Yoshi’s Crafted World retains the same formula that has been used since Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island back in 1992. Controlling one of the eight different breeds of Yoshi, the player must guide their dinosaur through several side scrolling stages, collecting several kinds of items, red coins and Smiley Flowers along the way. In order to collect certain items or defeat certain enemies, it is necessary to swallow enemies to produce egg projectiles, or collect them from various dispensers placed around the landscape.

One of the new gameplay mechanics of Yoshi’s Crafted World is that when you have completed certain levels within the game, you can revisit the area from the ‘flip side’. This option flips the game camera around, so you travel through the level from it’s finish line back to the start. The main aim of these flip side levels is to retrieve all three missing Poochy Pups and reaching the beginning of the stage. Although it may seem slightly obscure, it is often fascinating to see the levels from a different perspective. Another major benefit is that it may help you to obtain souvenirs and other items that you may not have seen on your first visit to the level in question.

Alongside the flip side mechanic, the Souvenir collecting missions also make their debut in Yoshi’s Crafted World. Once you have completed all the front side levels in a world, a Smiley Flower robot will ask you to find several ‘souvenir’ items with the front and flip sides of each level. These range from finding five milk bottles, to paper aeroplanes and even a clothesline which can be found hanging by a train station. Many of these quests can completed relatively quickly, but some of them require you to search the levels with a fine-tooth comb, which is a reminder of the difficulty that often came in the later stages of early era Nintendo titles.

From a graphical standpoint, Yoshi’s Crafted World is bright, sharp and colourful, and retains the same butter smooth frame rate whether your Nintendo Switch is in docked or handheld mode. Instead of being within a story book or in a woolen landscape, this time around you are in a hobby craft style world filled with bridges that are made of streamers, tunnels made of cardboard tubing and clouds that are made of cotton wool. The style fits perfectly for a Nintendo game, appealing to anyone who has ever made a bottle rocket or a spaceship from a cereal box and several pieces of coloured paper. The soundtrack is bright and bouncy, with several tunes that will bring a smile to your face, especially the music that plays in between each level, and the jingle that plays when a level has been completed.

Overall, Yoshi’s Crafted World is another high-quality Nintendo platformer that is perfected suited for the hybrid nature of the Nintendo Switch. The cute graphical style, along with the varying level design and numerous objectives will keep players young and old coming back long after the credits have rolled. If you are looking for the next big platformer after completing Super Mario Odyssey, or simply want to visit a hobby craft gaming wonderland, Yoshi’s Crafted World is an experience that you will not want to miss.