I've unlocked the first 5 levels so far, some observations:
1) I enjoy the dialog/text and situations encountered in the game thus far.
2) Combat is tedious if you configure it to Basic or Basic & Buttons (Unsure about the 3rd option).
- Too many steps for you to perform at the start of each turn of battle. The Paint process should be possible when looking at your deck of cards in combat via pressing one of the many, many unused buttons (Like X, Y, L1, L2, R1, R2, Start, Select etc.) this way you can eliminate 1 step and 2 transitions from the process. This will allow you to view your cards, paint them as necessary and when you've decided what ones to use you can press "A" on the cards you want to utilize and then press Up to Confirm selection and engage combat. This process would flow a lot more quickly and more smoothly.
- Game doesn't have any auto-sorting of cards as an option.
- The small animations and delays between each step makes it a lengthy process each turn.
- At the start of battle it seems to not remember where the selection courser was at the end of the last battle so you gotta scroll across past all the power-up cards to get to your combat cards. Surely they could have it default to the right most combat card instead?
3) When configuring the game to Basic & Buttons it will fail to show ANY indication of which button does what on the gamepad display!!! Like it doesn't say B (Back), A (Select), A (Paint), Up (Next Step) etc. during combat and you can't use the buttons at all in the Shop UI or CutOut UI.
4) Enemies don't drain in colour as you deal combo attacks making it impossible to tell if a combo attack does or doesn't deal more damage during the combo. If you defeat an enemy during a combo attack (Like performing an excellent jump on a Koopa) it will inexplicably still be half coloured when it flies off screen/dies.
5) Cut-Out mechanic seems to be an extremely bad excuse for terrible level designs. Instead of using it to cut away pieces of the background to reveal pipes, springs, hidden paths or hidden platforms it instead lets you magically teleport past obstacles and to all new locations because that is vastly better idea than how such things are handled in the Gamecube game (note the facetiousness in the italicized portion of that sentence). Let's just have Mario warp around instead of designing interesting ways to get from A to B instead of utilizing logical or interesting modes of transport!
6) The game has Off-TV gameplay support which means the game has support for a single display. This means that support for the Pro Controller shouldn't be an issue! So where is my Pro Controller support!?
7) There does not seem to be any XP system, so fighting enemies seems completely pointless?
Aside from these issues the game seems okay'ish, kinda? I might return the game within the 7 day satisfaction guarantee period that EBGames offers and wait for the game to drop in price before re-purchasing.
Edited by Nicholas Steel, 23 October 2016 - 08:05 AM.
