This is a Game Blog

If you like guys in clouds dropping coins on your head the whole time – then have I got a level for you. I’m not really sure what the intention is here, either perfectionists are going to run into trouble if they seek to get ‘every’ coin, or maybe I’m just too impatient to even try, but in any case – I tried to disregard coin-dropping dude for the most part, and just get to the end of the level.

After all, this is a very busy level.

The titular ‘big spiny’ in the level makes several appearances, and they aren’t necessarily difficult to beat, but when you get an invulnerability star, they are quite satisfying just to run through. For the most part though, they are there as an obstacle to clear, but far from insurmountable.

Time for the next boss, and there’s a lot going on at once in this level. There’s cannons, there’s bad guys, and there’s a fairly busy world in general as you push towards the second boss in the game.

I, surprisingly, didn’t die a lot on my push to the end though. It’s possible that I got lucky, but, more likely, is that the game mechanics are designed to get you through the levels on their own, but you need to put in the effort when it comes to coins, collectables and other feats to get the better score.

As for the boss itself, well – remember how much I love wall-jumping and backflipping? Well, this is the boss for me! This really just requires you to time a wall-jump perfectly so you can bounce on his head three times, and because I’m a sucker for a good jump, I threw in a few bonus bounces as well. This was a very satisfying bad guy to beat.

Once again, we are given a dark-and-dingy level to face, though this was admittedly one of the easier levels to collect all the special coins on.

For starters, there seemed to be lees volatility in the enemy (bats), and while they still presented a threat like any other flying enemy, they weren’t haphazard and, on-the-whole, a fairly conservative enemy.

The other boon for this level is that there are more chances to correct your mistakes – that is, chances to jump backwards. It might sound a bit silly, but jumping backwards in Super Mario Run is one of my favourite things to do. I don’t know whether it’s the animation or the fact that I get to pick up more coins or kill another enemy, but I find it satisfying every single time.

Lotsa deaths. Dodge bullets and mind the gap!

Either my timing is terrible, or this level is designed to try and kill you.

A lot.

There is a two-fold threat in this level. The first is the bullets that come at you fairly consistently throughout, and the nature of playing on a mobile means you have less-than-ideal lead time to see them coming, and try and both dodge them, and/or use them to get to higher levels. Sometimes, doing the former leads you to a death because of the other threat – the height.

Mastering the height and the platforming levels is more a matter of timing and not being too greedy. It’s very easy to try and grab that special coin or reach a little bit higher while bouncing off a bullet – it’s also very easy to miss-time the adventure and go plummeting off-screen. I did it many, many times, and it wasn’t until I took it a bit easy and just tried to reach ‘the end’ that I made it through.

This is a level that requires a lot more practice, patience and timing to be able to get right.

This is one of my favourite levels, as it is more puzzle-solving than combat or timing – but, if I’m perfectly honest, I’m not sure that I’ve cracked the code properly as to how to clear this level perfectly.

What makes this somewhat additionally satisfying is that I played as Luigi, which playing, in what essentially amounts to a haunted house, has echoes of Luigi’s Mansion.

For starters, I explored the entire areas thoroughly, and I still wasn’t able to collect all the special coins! I suspect that it has something to do with the ‘ghosts’ and the shaking doors, but I will have to replay the level a few times and experiment with different options.

I guess the ‘deception’ in the level title is probably the first hint.

There are some fun elements to this level, including the monkey bars which you get to swing across – and usually have a special coin attached to the bars – as long as you can either time your dismount correctly, or hang in there long enough to be able to collect it.

For the most part though, this is a fairly simple run of dodge-the-bad guy until you get reach the main reason why you’re here.

The first of the bosses! This one introduces Bowser to us – though it may just be a sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing, as it seems once you ‘kill’ him he just turns into a mushroom and … well … dies.

The battle itself seems fairly innocuous, until you realise the size of Bowser and you have to time your jump perfectly to be able to clear him. Once you do though, it’s just a matter of reaching the bridge switch that sends Pseudo-Bowser into the lava below.

This is very much an up-in-the-air level, with the focus here being on platforms with springs to get you up and flying. This level also introduces a new enemy – flying turtles – which also kind of introduces another technique which is useful for later levels, in that killing flying enemies requires a jump onto the head, rather than a jump into them, which really just kills you (or shrinks you, or knocks you back a few paces in your ‘try again’ bubble).

The other thing that this appears to introduce is the ‘red rings’, which brings with it a challenge to collect five red coins. At least I think it’s five, I couldn’t find any others, and by the time I got them all the timer had run down anyway. I’m not sure what this gets you, but I’ll endeavour to learn throughout the rest of these levels.