Super Mario 3D World: exquisite, essential 3D multiplayer update or mere stopgap?

[wraggster]

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/08/Super-Mario-3D-World-610x343.jpg (http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/08/Super-Mario-3D-World.jpg)Super Mario 3D World allows you to look around its environments by moving the GamePad. The feature, which turns the camera through roughly 270 degrees in any direction, is designed to afford you greater freedom to view Mario’s handsome new 3D landscapes, but ironically draws more attention to the fact that the game plays fast and loose with the promise made by its title.There’s nothing in our demo to suggest that 3D World will be anything less than a fine Mario outing, but even the most ardent series fan will find it difficult to play down the sense of disappointment at being served up on Nintendo’s most powerful hardware to date what feels like a spiritual successor to 3DS’sSuper Mario 3D Land (http://www.edge-online.com/review/super-mario-3d-land-review/). That said, this is an exquisitely enhanced successor, certainly looking the part even if it doesn’t necessarily play it.The game’s stages are vibrant and pleasingly chunky, everything imbued with that particular solidity that Nintendo artists have somehow made their own. Standing on a viewing platform during one of the stages pans the camera down and to the right, showing you in the hazy distance the towering obstacle course you’re about to tackle, and hinting at a more open world. It’s a moment that draws some surprising parallels with Fez, and not just aesthetically.Like Fez, the ostensibly 2D gameplay doesn’t preclude multiple routes. The three stages Nintendo has demoed so far have all manner of alternative paths and secrets, some only accessible with the new Cat Bell powerup and others teased out by rubbing and poking at the landscape through the GamePad’s touchscreen. Some of those secrets are obvious – a patch of grass or flowers, for instance, that throw out a coin or two when rubbed – but most aren’t marked. Searching every inch of the level just in case quickly becomes tiresome, but there is smart use of the GamePad elsewhere, such as the jump pads that are triggered by tapping the screen.

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