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GameCentral goes hands-on with several levels from Super Mario Bros. Wonder and is impressed by what seems to be another classic platformer.<\/p>\n
2023 has already proven to be a great year for gaming but the two frontrunners for Game of the Year are very obvious, with Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom and Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. There\u2019re still some enticing new games yet to come, including Spider-Man 2 and Forza Motorsport, but the smart money would be on Zelda and Baldur\u2019s Gate receiving the majority of the accolades\u2026 except, there is a third game that may well prove to be their equal.<\/p>\n
Super Mario Bros. Wonder recently got its own Nintendo Direct but, even so, it\u2019s still been an easy game to forget about up till now. We imagine the marketing blitz will begin shortly and as part of that we were recently given the chance to play a number of levels in both single-player and multiplayer. As a result, we\u2019re already convinced this is going to be a fantastic game, that easily lives up to the legacy of the 2D Super Mario series.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not necessarily a given, as all the most recent 2D Marios have been part of the New Super Mario Bros. sub-series, which while competent was strangely lacking in original ideas and suffered from atypically bland presentation, in terms of the graphics and music. The visuals in Wonder are still a touch too clinical for our liking but beyond that it seems like the perfect modern day platformer.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve played over an hour of the game but at the moment we can only talk about a small number of the levels and have to wait until an embargo next month to discuss the others. You can imagine the basics but there\u2019s actually a lot of extra features on top, like the worm living in Mario\u2019s cap (he\u2019s a prince or something) that allows you to pick a perk to use before you start a level. These have to be earned in short side levels\/tutorials, but a bunch were unlocked for us before we started and range from a parachute cap to the ability to wall climb and a self-explanatory safety bounce.<\/p>\n
The first stage we played was the one that\u2019s been shown off the most so far, in terms of trailer footage, called Welcome to the Flower Kingdom. You can play as almost anyone from the Mushroom Kingdom, including Mario but also Luigi, Peach, Daisy, and several colours of Toad and Yoshi (although oddly not the main red Toad, who we didn\u2019t see at all in the game).<\/p>\n
Every level is designed like a traditional Super Mario stage, with a goal at the far right and a checkpoint flag in the middle, but getting to the end is not really beating a level at all, since what you\u2019re really after are Wonder Seeds and Wonder Flowers. There\u2019s a lot of clever moving between the foreground and background, and more overtly puzzle-like elements than usual, but in general everything is relatively normal for a Mario game\u2026 until you collect a Wonder Flower.<\/p>\n
At this point Mario seems to undergo some sort of acid trip (hardly a stretch for a franchise that already has you eating magic mushrooms) and at that point literally anything can happen. In the first level the pipes start shooting up and down and then crawling off on their own \u2013 giving you access to previously unreachable heights \u2013 but that\u2019s nothing compared to some of the other levels.<\/p>\n