Dr Mario World is lovely, but it can't find a cure for mobile gaming's business model

Dr Mario World, which releases later this week, perfectly sums up Nintendo's compromised adventure in smartphone gaming. It's a supremely polished, easy-to-enjoy game that meets the Kyoto company's famously high quality bar. It takes one of Nintendo's classic games - a block-matching puzzler that dates back to a 1990 Nintendo Entertainment System original - and reworks it for touchscreens with imagination and care. And for its business model, it resignedly copies what everyone else does, at a cost to the design and balance of the game that has been minimised, but is still there.

In Dr Mario, the goal is to clear the screen of "viruses" by matching them with blocks of the same colour, in the form of the coloured pill capsules that are sent into play. It's a perfect fit for the platform ruled by Candy Crush, of course, but Nintendo and its co-developer NHN haven't been lazy in reimagining it for phones. In fact, they've literally turned the game on its head. In classic Dr Mario, capsules rain down from the top of the field, Tetris-style, but in Dr Mario World they float up from the bottom, the better to be positioned with a pleasing sweep of the thumb. Control feel comes first and dictates design: classic Nintendo.

What's more, while the original game sets a relentless pace, World's puzzle stages allow you to pause and ponder, making your next move only when you're ready. (Timed challenge stages and the frantic, fun multiplayer are a different matter.) You're limited not by your reactions or by a ticking clock, but by the complexity of the puzzle and the number of capsules you have to solve it. Even the order of the capsules has not been left entirely to chance. This is a very intentional, designed game, and it's a pleasure to puzzle out the most efficient solutions to each stage. There's a lot of it, too: five worlds of 40 stages each, with more to come.

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