At best it feels a little redundant, and at worst it makes certain combat-focused levels completely pointless, as every threat can be cleared before the person controlling Captain Toad reaches it. With one player controlling the lead character, the other can use a Joy-Con to point at elements in the world and fire turnip projectiles at them - think Super Mario Galaxy’s Star Bit-firing second player. The levels themselves are only slightly altered: on Switch, there are no platforms that require you to blow into a microphone to move, while 3DS has had the number of enemies reduced in most stages, probably to account for the drop in movement accuracy when moving from analog stick to Circle Pad.Ī new two-player mode on Switch is welcome, but probably won’t be of interest to many. If you ever wanted to demonstrate why people talk about Nintendo designers in hushed tones, this might not be the absolute best example, but it’s certainly the most efficient.Ĭhanges from the Wii U original are minimal, on the whole. Ideas are introduced and thrown away at crazy pace. There are minecart dashes, timed chases, battle arenas. Others are more like Rubik’s Cubes, needing to be physically shifted into new positions to let you get around. Some levels are more like optical illusions, twisting in on themselves and asking the player to swing the camera around to find hidden doors or sneaky secrets. The Wii U’s failure means there will be a swathe of players who didn’t get a chance to play this the first time round, which makes this re-release as much an act of game preservation as it is an easy stop-gap between truly new first-party releases.Įach of Treasure Tracker’s levels (not counting the bonus remix stages) is a miniature obstacle course with a Star to collect and hidden Gems to uncover, but the pleasure is in how many ways that single thread is spun into different shapes. The Switch and 3DS versions don’t add much to the original, but they never really needed to.
In 2018 on the Nintendo Switch and 3DS, Treasure Tracker remains a rare delight, nabbing iconography from across the core Super Mario series - characters, blocks and power-ups all function exactly as you expect them to - but recontextualising them under a single new ethos: “What if Jumpman couldn’t jump?” There’s still nothing quite like it. Read the full Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker review. It speaks volumes about Treasure Tracker’s wit and environment design that it completely strips us of the mobility powers that we’ve come to expect from a game set in the Super Mario universe and still provides lots of interesting puzzle options.” I’d also call it one of the best platformers of the year, except these characters can’t jump. “Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is one of the smartest, most charming puzzle games of 2014.
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