Still hinging, I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon playing KoolKat Super Mario Bros PC 2, and here's the review.
It opens up in a traditional hub style, but it's quite obvious that KoolKat didn't try anything outlandish with it. The transitions between door to door are inconvienent, requiring the player to hit vine blocks in order to progress, laced with warp zones in the same section that just weren't neccesary. If I were to access the later levels after game overs, I'd have to go through the dull passageways again and again.
The levels themselves are hit or miss, and the majority of them are extremely short. That being said, I found the difficulty to be quite normal for a Mario game, with some exceptions where the difficulty would spike drastically.
There were some fairly creative ideas in this thing, too. I really digged the graphic style/concept in Wetwater Way, which if KoolKat worked more on, could potentially become a very interesting level. The concept is there.
The earlier levels are composed in really weird ways. Mario's appereance changes in almost every level. from a brighter SMB3 colour in one to his SMW form in another, which only appears in a single SMW-themed level. In 8bitland, the NES Mario sprite just looked like our fellow plumber was having a spasm whenever he walked. It felt like KoolKat had several ideas when planning this episode that never took off and the remains were left.
Some levels had really awkward NPC placement, with Goombas appearing right next to spawn points giving the player minium ammount of time to avoid them. The yellow plants in Piranha Plant Plains were just confusing with the sprite incorrection, and this ended up being the most challenging aspect of the whole episode.
The whole episode feels very rushed. If KoolKat had focused more on the awkward aesthetics it may have looked stunning. While the gameplay was enjoyable, nearly everything feels like an afterthought, from the clearly limited experimentation of colour contrast, to the bizzare ending events to some of the levels. It's quite evident based on the way the star system falls apart at the semi-finale that this episode wasn't tested thoroughly either, and shows as an example for why taking your time is so important - a valuable lesson we all should learn as level designers.
There's nothing entirely outstanding about this episode, but I defintely feel that KoolKat has potential. The groundwork is there, he just needs to put a lot more effort into it. With all that said however, it is a fun little game to play, and the final level is quite humorous and worth reaching. Granted this episode is a good 2-3 years old now, and KoolKat's design will no doubt have improved. It wouldn't hurt for him to look back and see where he went wrong.
I would recommend it if you're bored and want to play a short and sweet episode, but don't expect to be blown away.
4/10
