"Great fun, and a great challenge to boot"

This great platformer with a cutesie style and slick gameplay really delivers. From the first stage you are treated to a brightly coloured menagerie of plants, animals and environments. This game, the successor to the Snes game of the same name packs quite a bit more challenge and more beautiful, crisp environments

The controls in this game are responsive and intuitive, each button serves a purpose and each baby (of which there are 5) has a different application. Baby Mario makes Yoshi run faster, and has a special superstar Mario mode. Baby Peach can float on air currents and Baby DK can hang on vines. There are two unexpected additions to the cast with the greedy Wario and demanding Bowser, who attract coins and spit fireballs, respectively.

Yoshi's main methods of dispatching enemies are standard platformer fare, jumping and stomping on enemy's heads to defeat them. And interesting twist though, is that Yoshi can swallow and then spit out again most enemies. Instead of spitting out the enemies Yoshi can swallow them and create and egg, which he can then throw at other enemies, switches and other interactive objects. This is required for most puzzles, of which there are quite a few, a few demanding multiple baby switching to solve.

In each stage you collect 20 red coins, 30 stars, 5 flowers and a secret character coin in every level. The collective scores accumulated from collecting all of these things gets tallied at the end of the level, out of 100. Procuring all the character coins in a world unlocks you a special hard version of the minigames in the minigame menu. Collecting 700 points in one world will net you a bonus game used to earn lives and collecting the full 800 points will open to you a secret stage (in which you play as a black Yoshi).

This adds an extra challenge to the already challenging task of getting through all 8 worlds, with 8 stages in each. This adds a lot to the replayability of the game, getting 100 points on some stages will take you a whole hour on some of the harder ones, I know it has cost me a hell of a lot of lives trying to do it to the first world alone.

The music is enjoyable though repetitive and sometimes forgettable, though you may find yourself humming the occasional tune hours after you've put the game down. The sound effects are great and every time you open and close the DS you get treated to a nostalgic "Yoshi!" and the titillating iconic tongue sound. Yoshi's flutter jump still makes me giggle a little bit inside each time. >_>

The graphics are beautiful, bright and very cute, each world has it's own theme and this makes for great variation with themes like deserts and clouds, all replete with beautiful backgrounds and fitting tasks to carry out in each level, though the main task is just to make it to the end, though there are usually more than one ways to go about it. Depending on what baby you have you can take a different approach each time.

My only gripe with this game is the boring and quite inane plot, which revolves around the babies of the kingdom being kidnapped and the few free babies left and the Yoshi's decide to save them, not very much explanation is given and at no point did I feel driven with an unquenchable desire to avenge those poor babies

In all this game is well worth the money and will give you hours and hours of fun (and maybe frustration >:| ). This game can be very challenging for even the seasoned gamer, and this is one of the games that you can pick up and put down at a moments notice, though you won't be wanting to put it down very often.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/14/07