Nintendo released the 4th installment in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series over the Holiday 2010 season and I have been pretty much sitting on this game the whole time. After owning the game for a couple of months, I dusted off my DSi XL and took the plastic of Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem. The Lemmings-like puzzle game was one of my favorites at the Nintendo booth from E3 2010. I had a really good time with the game, but is it for you?
First, the good things about Mini-Land Mayhem. The gameplay is a very unique puzzle style which has you strategically moving mechanical mini-Marios through doors to exit and end the stage. You play the game by tapping on one of your toy Marios on the touch screen which starts up the level. Your wind-up Marios cannot be controlled with the d-pad or any other controls though. Mario only moves in one direction until you hit a wall or some other obstacle that forces him to go in the opposite direction. This however is where the strategy comes into the game. As you make your way through all 8 levels of the game, the difficulty ramps up by adding a new ways to move your Marios around the map. It starts off simple enough with steel girders, conveyor belts, and ladders but makes things interesting by adding springs, magnetic walls and warp pipes.
This way of increasing the difficulty of the game works perfectly. The learning curve for a game does not get much better than this. Just as you master one of the tools, you are given another one to deal with in order to move on to the next level. Most of game play is based on when you start your Marios moving and when you set up your new tools which could have made the difficulty super cheap and frustrating. Its because of this difficulty curve that makes you want to keep going through all the levels. This is a very good thing because there are a ton of levels. I was just about to throw the towel in on the game because it initially looks like there were only going to be 8 levels with 7 stages each. To my pleasant surprise, after you finish these first 8 levels you unlock 20 special stages, 20 expert stages, and a hard mode. This doubled up the amount of game play that you get and is all on top of the level creator and levels that you can download via WiFi connection. This game never ends as you can continue to download official Nintendo levels and user created levels.
The problem with this game is that it is not for everyone. The gameplay style is very unique and does not have the universal appeal of something like an RPG or first-person shooter. Also, while there are tons and tons of stages, there is zero replay value for each stage. One you have passed each stage with enough points to earn a trophy, there is nothing to motivate you go back and play it again. Nintendo took the time to put in the WiFi capability to download extra stages but they could have taken it a step further to put in online leader boards. If it had the high score for each stage, fastest time for each stage, and then also highest lifetime score this would have added that replayability to the levels to make you want to keep playing.
To wrap this one up, Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem is a solid game that will kill many hours of your life. If you are a fan of the previous titles from the GameBoy Advance and DS, this is definitely going to be for you. The addition of new stages over WiFi is a big breakthrough for the DS and adds a ton of life on to the game. If you haven’t played the game, you may want to borrow it from a friend or spend some time watching gameplay videos first before making the purchase.