Nintendo released a “free-to-play” game on both Wii U and 3DS last week. That game is Mini Mario & Friends: Amiibo Challenge. I put free-to-play in quotations there because while the software can be downloaded at no cost, you can’t actually do anything but stare at the title screen without an amiibo figure. Womp-womp.
Scanning an amiibo gives you a little wind-up version of the character you scanned to play the game with. As long as that character is from either the Mario or Donkey Kong family. Also Wario doesn’t count for whatever reason. If you scan any other amiibo, you get to play as a little cube robot named Mini Spek. For reasons that I will get into right away, you don’t want to be Mini Spek.
You can see above that the amiibo I scanned is named Barky. It’s my Wolf Link amiibo. I think it’s a good name. Also my Bowser amiibo’s name is Mittens.
When you scan a Mario character amiibo, you get a fancy little robot toy with a special ability. For example, Mini Mario can do wall jumps, Mini Peach can hover over short gaps, and Mini Bowser Jr can cross over spikes unharmed. These special abilities can be used to collect amiibo tokens scattered about the stages and enter special character-specific doors.
The doors unlock small worlds off the main path, which essentially means that you’re limited to about 11 stages if you don’t have the correct amiibos. Mini Spek is completely unable to enter (or even reach) the character doors, as he has no abilities whatsoever. His game will be over before you know it. Stages unlocked by Mario amiibos account for more than half the game, and nearly all of it when you consider that amiibo tokens unlock the Star World stages.
That sounds pretty bad, yeah? What’s even worse is that the gameplay is actually really fun, so you’d better already have those amiibos, because that’s some really expense DLC if you’re comparing content to dollars spent (an amiibo figure costs $15.99). And if you don’t want to collect those Mario amiibos? You might as well just skip this game. The stages you can play with Mini Spek are good, but ultimately they just made me hungry for more.
Each stage is a little puzzle where you have to get your toy character to the door at the end. You have a certain number of items, like girders and trampolines, to move around the stage to avoid obstacles, and there are coins scattered about to bump up your score. Imagine Lemmings, except you manipulate the environment instead of the character. Figuring out the path to the exit is usually easy enough, but collecting all the coins and finishing the stage fast enough will earn you a trophy, and that takes a little more finesse.
It’s really too bad that Amiibo Challenge is shackled to amiibos, but I suppose that was never intended as a surprise. It is right in the name, after all. The upside is that if you don’t want to spend $160 on amiibos to get all that this game offers, Mario vs Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars (available as a cross-buy on Wii U and 3DS) has the exact same gameplay at a much lower cost. So I think I’ll probably check that out, because like I said, Amiibo Challenge has really only just whet my appetite for this kind of puzzle game.