Yoshi's New Island Review

Yoshi's New Island is the third game in the series that recently released on the Nintendo 3ds and it's been 8 years since the last Yoshi's Island game was made, all the way back in 2006 on the DS, which was a wonderful game. However, Yoshi's New Island tries to forget that ever existed and instead attempts to copy the SNES Classic in every possible way, and do a bad job of it to boot. Problem is, the game hasn't aged well enough considering it's 19 years old. So New Island tries to copy a dated game with aged mechanics. It's not that the mechanics are bad really, or that the game itself is awful, but it's just gone through a lot of bad development choices.

The game is a 2d platformer where you traverse from left to right, and Yoshi has a variety of abillities such as eating enemies to lay eggs (you ca then throw those eggs at enemies and objects to progress), pounding the ground and flutter jumping... everything the original had. The game has slowed down the physics of the gameplay to focus more on exploration, but Yoshi just takes forever to go anywhere. He runs extraordinarily slowly and the developers decided to slow down every action, probably to also pad out the shockingly short levels. The game doesn't really introduce any 'New' gameplay elements, even though the game's title says otherwise. There are a few new enemies and Giant Eggs that Yoshi can throw, but it's essentially new levels with better graphics using a lot of the foundations of the original.

The game's art-style is really good and innovative though, it's one of the few things in the game I can safely say is good. The game's levels and characters are themed after a storybook, with crayon coloured hills and water painted shaded enemies. Sadly some of the level themes can clash with each other that just looks weird, for example one level has a grey black and white background but fully bright platforms and enemies in the foreground that just looks odd, and another has a volcano that shoots lava rocks at you, that emit a weird radioactive glow that looks unnatural.

True next-gen graphics for sure. In all seriousness though, the art-style's great, but if viewed on anything but a 3ds screen the game looks horrific and trailers do no favours for its visuals.

Sadly from that bad point we move on to another, the soundtrack. Oh God the soundtrack! Essentially every single level in the game (minus the castle, fortress and boss levels) use the same, mediocre boring music track remixed constantly to fit each them of the level. Some say it's a style, but I say it's atrocious. Seriously, just listen to this monstrosity! This should give anyone an idea of what horrible sounds await them in this game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9RN2tSJIKM The game's primary instrument is a kazoo to simulate a children's playroom, and everyone knows a kazoo isn't even an instrument. It's a torture device.

Overall, I may love Yoshi as a video game character massively and adore his design, but that's not enough to save this game. It's not a train wreck I'd say, but it's got an extremely niche audience.

Overall it gets a 5/ 10.