Trouble always seems to find its way to the Mushroom Kingdom. Just as Mario and Luigi go off on a coin hunt in the sky, their beloved Princess Peach is kidnapped by the dastardly Koopalings. The brothers have to venture through over 80 stages to rescue her, grabbing an endless deluge of coins across land, water, air, and snow along the way.

The New Super Mario Bros series brings back the side-scrolling action of the original NES games and replaces 2D sprites with 3D ones. The 80 stages are spread over 6 main worlds & 2 quite difficult to find secret worlds. In addition to finishing each stage if you want to unlock all the extra levels you need to collect three giant coins which are hidden in each one.

Looking at the gameplay itself  nothing much has changed. Mario jumps, hops and runs just as well as ever and the controls are easy to use. Where the game starts to differ is its more focused on coins & your competitive nature, for example if you collect 100 coins you will be rewarded with an extra life, but the game counts up how many coins you collect through your entire game. There’s a new game mode too, called Coin Rush where you have one life and a small time limit where you have to collect as much cash as you can over a series of short stages. For both your coin total & your ‘mini’ game coin total, your results are shared via StreetPass & SpotPass giving you targets to aim for.  StreetPass lets gamers share their Coin Rush high scores with other players they meet, while SpotPass takes collected coins and adds them to a Worldwide Coin Total. Apparently there’s also a reward for reaching a million coins, though Nintendo remains tightlipped on the prize.

New Super Mario Bros 2 has familiar power-up items such as the Super Leaf, Mega Mushroom and Super Star to help you tackle obstacles in your way. However it also boasts  new power-ups:

• Gold Flower - this flower turns you into Gold Mario, it gives you Gold Fireballs that turn almost everything into coins-bricks. Each enemy you stomp on also gives you five coins.
• Gold Block - Hit a repeating coin block enough times and it turns gold and gets stuck on Mario’s head. Run as fast as possible with this block attached and watch the coins add up.
• Gold Ring - Hop through a gold ring and all enemies will turn into gold for a short time, giving more coins.
• Gold Mushroom - This  only appears in Coin Rush mode. But if you manage to find one, you’ll get 50 coins on the spot.

On the downside I think they could have done more with the 3D side of things, there are no 3D puzzles and to be honest the 3D effect for me did nothing more than make the background seem a little blurry. Aside from the 3D the landscapes are colourful and interesting providing a challenge for veteran Mario gamers whilst still being user friendly enough for anyone new to Mario.  I would suggest for any Mario fan this is a must have addition to your collection and if you have never played Mario before give it a go before you know it you will have lost a few hours.

I would score Super Mario Bros 2 – 8/10