A fun little platformer with a twist.
This goes back to the 2D platforming roots of mario, but puts you in the shoes of Princess Peach....with an umbrella. Mario has been captured and now it's your job as Peach to take your trusty umbrella and your attitude and go save that little mustached plumber!
As I said, this is an old school style 2D platformer, just your Peach instead of Mario. You'll still be doing a lot of jumping and baddie smashing. However, you can now use your parasol as your weapon instead of your shoes and your butt. Although this is cool and presents a bit of new "moves" for you to perform, it makes the battles significantly easier. You can just run around swinging and not have to worry much about precision.
Your emotions are also an addition to the combat as well as the platforming. There are certain areas you cannot get through without certain emotions. For example, if you are on a wodden bridge and you need to be below it you light on fire to burn the bridge. Or if you go across something and the floor falls out try running across crying because you'll run faster. These are a neat addition as well, although you'll basically find them used for the same thing all game instead of multiple uses for each.
There are some fairly neat boss battles in the game that require you to use your emotions to stun them then damage them. Mario has never had to famous of boss battles, and these won't be changing that status any, but they do the job.
There are also a bunch of extras you can unlock by gaining coins and purchasing them from Toad in between levels. These include new moves for your umbrella, health upgrades, emotional upgrades, and mini games. Some will take quite a bit of coin collecting to get, but you'll get enough coins from just playing the game once through to buy most of the important stuff.
The graphics have a nice 2D look that you would expect from a game like this. No awards will be won here, but it's not terrible to look at or anything. Looks nice and clean.
After beating the game once you'll unlock an additional 3 levels to check out in each world. However, you'll have to play through the other levels in each world again to be able to get to these. Some of them are actually fairly challenging though which is nice since the main part of the game is pretty easy.
All in all it's a fun little platformer to see life in the eyes of Peach. However, it slightly feels like Nintendo made this for girls and in turn toned down the difficulty level as if they couldn't handle a hardcore platformer or something. It's to bad, cause it definitly had to potential. It was fun to run through and not to long so I'd say its worth a playthrough and hopefully we'll be seeing more with this tone in the future.