Yoshi Touch & Go is the third first-party Nintendo DS game to be released so far for the system, which is by no means a bad thing. If you know anything about Nintendo you know that the term “quality over quantity” describes the developer perfectly.

     The best way to describe Yoshi Touch & Go would be to say it’s the epitome of pick-up-and-play.  It does not have a storyline. It does not have a single campaign to complete. Yoshi Touch & Go consists for four modes. The first is called ‘Score Attack’.  Score Attack gives you a feel for what the game is. The first half is drawing clouds with your stylus to guide Baby Mario safely to the ground, avoiding floating spikes and flying Shy-guys. The other half is a side-scroller. You do everything you can to ensure Yoshi survives unscathed til the end.The second game mode is ‘Marathon’, probably the best one, in my distinguished opinion. It’s also known as ‘Endless’, and for good reason. The only time ‘Marathon’ ever ends is when you die. I made it approximately 5,000 meters before dying (my best score), and I was so pleased with myself, because Yoshi Touch & Go is not an easy game. The other two modes are ‘Time Attack’ and ‘Challenge’. Neither of them are very good, and to me they both kind of appear to be almost identical, except that in ‘Challenge’ you draw golden clouds instead of white ones.

     The object of Yoshi Touch & Go, and what gives it so much replay value is the fact that it’s a score-based game. You can play it for the rest of your natural life, to keep improving on your score. That’s the fun in it.

     The difficulty level ranges from incredibly easy to Devil May Cry-like impossible. Each  stage goes through little patches of extreme simplicity, and extreme difficulty. In Yoshi Touch & Go you don’t actually control Yoshi. All you can do to Yoshi herself is make her jump or float depending on how many times you tap on her with the stylus. The rest of the gameplay is made up of you madly scratching your stylus all over the bottom touch screen to draw cloud bridges to save Yoshi from falling into pits, tapping the screen anywhere to have Yoshi throw eggs, or draw cloud circles around enemies to turn them into coins and rack up points. It’s really quite addicting.

     The two features that play a big role in most games don’t really have much of an impact on Yoshi Touch & Go. Of course, I’m speaking of graphics and sound. The sound is your basic Yoshi music we’ve known for 15 years or so, with the addition of ‘popping’ and ‘floating’ noises to showcase that you’re either drawing clouds or “ballooning” enemies. The graphics are an updated, crisp, clean, and more fluid version of the look we all know and love from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. They’re just good, decent graphics that go well with the Yoshi formula. See, like I said, neither of these really have an impact on the gameplay.

     Yoshi Touch & Go also consists of 2-player multiplayer. Yes, as with most other big-name DS games, multiplayer only requires one player to own the game. The second player simply downloads the multiplayer content, and you can compete wirelessly via the DSs’ wireless capabilities. It’s really fun. You just do the same thing you’d do in ‘Score Attack’, except that you compete with someone else to see who can rack up the most points. Good, but by no means genre-defining.

Bottom Line

            All in all, Yoshi Touch & Go is an enjoyable and worthwhile experience all-around. It has nice, sharp menus, two unlockable game modes, and an unlockable multiplayer course. It doesn’t have a story mode. It’s simply a fun game, no matter who you are. It is definitely a worthwhile game to have in your DS library to hold you over until all those awesome first-party DS games come out later in the summer and fall. It’s so simple, yet, so much fun to play. I give it my second-highest recommendation.

-Reviewed by SCP

Box Score

Graphics – 8

Gameplay – 8.5

Sound – 7

Multiplayer – 7

Presentation – 8

V.G. Hut Rating:

8.0

NOT AN AVERAGE