For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Mario vs. Donkey Kong. This game previously came out on Game Boy Advance and i feel like there's a chance i tried it out on it, but it was so long ago i don't remember one way or another.
So going into this game, i didn't really know how it was going to play. Other than possibly the first game, i've not played any of the subsequent releases. i've seen trailers and heard people talking about them, but that's it. So coming into this i was really expecting the game to tutorialize what to do and how to play it, not just because it's a #demo but also because it's different from other Mario games.
I was surprised by how unhelpful the tutorial was, what little there was. It's always possible the main game might be a little different as this is a demo that knows it's a demo. the main landing page says demo and it has a link to the eShop. But i suspect that's not the case. The biggest issue with this was the final level with the Mario Toys. i genuinely had no idea what to do and all the game said was guide the toys to the letter blocks. so i walked them to a letter block and they did nothing. it wasn't until i jumped and moved that i realised the toys were following me and have no Ai intelligence themselves.
The demo is only 4 levels and two difficulty levels. the first 3 levels were nice and short with some different platforming and puzzle stuff. the fourth level was the one with the toy Mario's. But it was the difficulty levels that i found most interesting. i started with casual, as it's my first time, but i didn't really know what it was as the game doesn't say what the differences are between them. but after playing i can say that casual adds checkpoints to the levels and a bubble save to the already lives you have. in the normal mode, you only have lives.
I didn't have fun playing this so i'm glad that it's short. it was nice that the demo had a trailer and screenshots for the game. overall, the demo knowing it's a demo was great and a brilliant example of how to do demos. but all that extra detail helped to confirm that this isn't a game i want to play. as well as the poor tutorial, i also found basic stuff like jumping not what i expected and disappointing. i would recommend people try the demo before buying the game as it does feel outdated. it may look nice, but it's accessibility is lacking nowadays.
