March of the Minis provides a fast, fun, real-time puzzle challenge for the Nintendo DS
Each floor of the Park has 9 levels, and in each level, you’ll be tasked to maneuver the Mini’s - simultaneously, or one at a time – and direct them over pits, into pipes and around enemies and other hazards. Each level is something of a maze and will require that you get the tiny robotic Marios from their starting positions to an Exit door. To pass each stage, you need only successfully guide one Mini, so the game can go by very quickly. Most players will want to get the maximum score for each level, though, and this will require that you not only get every Mario to safety, but you must do so within a set time limit, and sometimes even within a certain order, as well as refrain from stopping any Minis once they are set in motion. It can make for some fast-paced, sometimes hectic, fun.
The controls make use of the stylus to navigate menus and control your minis, and the only button pressing you’ll be doing will be to move your camera around the level via the cross pad (the buttons on the right side of the screen serve as a cross pad for lefties). Well-timed taps and swipes will make up the majority of your input. Tap a mini to get him started, swipe in a direction to change his course, or swipe upward to make him jump. You can also tap a second time to make it stop, though stopping a mini once it’s been started will result in a scoring penalty. The controls are simple, and effective, and give you what you need to navigate the sometimes complicated landscape, without bogging things down with too many inputs. Occasionally, the responsiveness of the touch screen is such that you are asked for very refined directions that the game is then unable to interpret. It’s a minor frustration, and usually the levels are forgiving enough that a single miss-swipe will not foil your plans entirely.
Unfortunately, many of the levels wind up being far too easy, even with all those optional requirements. More often than not a quick study of the environment will reveal the solution, and then it’s just a matter of a few tries to get any necessary timing down. The later levels are sometimes an exception, with complicated and occasionally frustrating solutions, but this comes a little too late in the game to redeem the package on the whole in terms of gameplay challenge, or replay value. Worse still, are the numerous levels that serve to showcase a new environmental gadget, only to never see that gadget again in later levels!
As you progress through the park, each floor is themed – jungle, lava world, pipe land, etc. - but the thematic elements wind up getting lost in and amongst the more frequent components that are common to all areas (like pipes, and conveyor belts). Usually, it is only by looking at the colorful backgrounds, or listening to the soundtrack that you will have cause to remember which floor you’re even on.
The end-of-floor boss fights are also somewhat lacking. Each floor concludes with a boss battle that plays out in an extremely repetitive fashion: DK hovers on the top screen somewhere, and you control a cannon on the bottom of the screen with your stylus. The object being to hit the burly ape several times with the Mini’s you’ve gathered in the level. The controls are always the same – swipe left or right to spin a large wheel which will aim your cannon or dodge incoming projectiles, then tap to shoot. Since each boss level is formatted in almost exactly the same way, there’s little room for innovation, and no deviation in the control. Also, contrary to the other puzzle-oriented challenges in the game, the only challenge in the boss fights is aiming you trajectories. Like the other levels, you can play these boss fights again after you’ve beaten them once to try to improve your score (you’ll need to perform flawlessly to achieve the maximum scores), but you probably won’t bother. After the first few levels these fights quickly loose their charm and cease to be fun altogether. The final boss fight does deviate from this formula, with a whimsical nod to the past, but that level ends up being even easier than previous boss battles.
Visually, MvDK2 is acceptable, but not outstanding. The design is charming enough, given the light-hearted context. The levels are colorful and detailed, and the tiny characters are rendered well. Each of the many toy enemies is cute and appealing, and the backgrounds provide a subtle, yet attractive backdrop for the action. On the downside, since all the action takes place on the touch-screen, the top screen is completely dominated by mostly inconsequential information, like your score, and the number of Minis remaining. Additionally, the menu systems are just plain boring to look at, consisting of the façade of elevator buttons. And as for the few movie clips presented, they are so short, they almost might as well not be there at all. The sound and music are a pleasant surprise, with tons of bleeps, growls and whirrs, to go along with all the many gadgets and platform elements. The soundtrack is a nice collection of somewhat jazzy remixes of other Mario themes, and they do a good job of highlighting the action without becoming overwhelming or obnoxious.
On the whole, it just feels like there is a lot of lost potential in this game’s main campaign, so it’s a good thing the developers included the level editor, allowing you to make puzzle levels of your own and share them via the DS’s wifi. With so many forgettable levels in the game proper, it’s nice to have the ability to make your own.
The plot’s not that great, but it’s about what you’d expect for a puzzle game. The fun level design brings the game together in a pretty solid package. For what it’s worth, Mario vs Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis provides an enjoyable platforming puzzle challenge on the go.