Super Mario Maker is simply a Mario level creator. When creating a level you have the choice of four game styles (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros U) and six themes (Ground, Underground, Underwater, Ghost House, Airship, and Castle). When you are building your masterpiece you have a huge variety of items and enemies to use with new building blocks like the Donut Block and the Fire Koopa Clown Car. It sounds pretty simple but it can actually be a little overwhelming even with the game giving you the items in portions as you play the game. Sometimes I forget some features even exist until I am reminded of them through the community levels.
The community levels are where this game really shines in my opinion. For me, building levels takes an immense amount of time so most of my experience with the game has been through experiencing other peoples' creations. It can be hard to find good creations, though. The game itself doesn't have a built-in search tool that works through keywords. Instead, you have to find levels through a separate website and then type in the code of the level into the game. It just seems unnecessarily complicated. Is it so hard to have a keyword-based search bar? It shouldn't be. If I don't want to find a specific kind of level, however, the menus that Super Mario Maker does have work just fine. When the game was first released the 'Rating' tab was filled with levels without a whole lot of substance like 'Auto Mario' levels and really short but hard gauntlet-type levels. Since then, the 'Rating' tab has been updated many times in order to present the best levels.
Super Mario Maker also has a couple other modes in store. The 10 Mario Challenge and 100 Mario Challenge can be a great way to test your skill. The 10 Mario Challenge gives you 10 lives and has you surviving a number of developer-created levels while the 100 Mario Challenge gives you 100 lives and has you surviving a number of user-created levels of various difficulty. You can pick the difficulty you want to play on in this mode but it doesn't matter as it is very rarely you get an actually well-designed Mario level. Most of them consist of things flying at you from every direction or 'Auto-Mario' stages. This mode does have a 'skip' option by holding down the 'minus' button so if you realize a level is bad you can just skip it but this feature does cost you a life. I barely ever go on this mode and use it mostly to unlock the various Hidden Block Costumes that the game has to offer.
Super Mario Maker is fun to experiment with. There are ways to find really well designed stages but the amount of effort you have to go through to do so is way more than it should be. The level creator is really fleshed out and simple to use but I still wish that we had more. Who knows? Maybe we will continue to get updates that add new gameplay options.
Super Mario Maker is a really fun distraction.
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