Dr. Mario World Review: Well Below Nintendo’s Usual Standard

A lot of
gamers hold Nintendo highly when compared to other developers over the years.
But if Dr. Mario World is a sign of things to come, then it’s fair to say they
will lose a lot of respect.

Well
below expectations

Where do
I begin with this one? There are so many match-three games on the Play store
that to stand out, you have to do something different. Nintendo
managed to do something different, they made the match-three system even
worse.

When you
place a pill, it slowly drops from the bottom of your screen towards the top. Although, you can still
manipulate it, as long as you don’t drag the pill upwards. This means you can
place a pill in a tight gap and then rotate it, in an impossible space.

Gameplay
is boring

My gripes
are with every part of the pill placing and rotating system. You can drag and
let multiple pills fall to the ceiling, but they can push and affect one
another.

Which I
don’t mind because that is what would happen in reality, but then why can you
rotate pills at the very last second? It seems weird for pills to affect each
other while falling, but they can clip through each other to be rotated.

These are
just minor points to my main argument. The actual game itself is tedious, stale
and actually not enjoyable. The game has Mario, Bowser and various other famous
faces, yet they don’t even say a word.

The PvP
section is another area that lets the game down. You make matches and attack
the other player in order to increase the size of their game space. But
there are no warnings and no time to react.

Many
times I was milliseconds away from making a match myself when my entire game
board jumps and there is nothing I can do but lose. This makes the entire
online experience frustrating and unreliable. One second you are on for a win,
then you blink and the match you were trying to make moved and ruined your entire
board.

Predatory
Practices

I
recently reviewed a game which had pay to win aspects and I didn’t criticise it
all that much. This is because the overall gameplay was fun and not ruined by
the fact that I had
to pay to get better or to have more fun.

In Dr.
Mario World I need to pay to play online again. I chose Bowser because the
first 20 levels I had to play as a mute Mario. Little did I know this choice
was permanent and now I am stuck as a heavy character. His attacks online take
so long that I am often nearly defeated before I have attacked the opponent
once.

Oh, but
don’t worry, a top tip inside the game is to try other characters out to see
who you like. Good thing it will cost me 40 gems to try my luck at another
character. Or I might be lucky and get skill points for Bowser again!

Gambling and unfair

Had the
game told me that the character I chose is one I am stuck with, I probably
wouldn’t have chosen Bowser. Had the game allowed me to try out a few
characters before making a permanent decision, I probably wouldn’t have chosen
Bowser.

They designed the game to give you a bad time with the solution
to your misery being
just one crate away. This is the predatory practices all gamers should know,
the deceptive and evil methods used by big game developers to encourage you to
spend a few extra bucks.

It makes
perfect sense why they wouldn’t adjust this game to fit the new laws in
Belgium. Because if they did, they would probably have a decent free game
where players would not need to spend any money to enjoy it. Something the
executives at Nintendo cannot let happen at any cost!