Yoshi's Woolly World

A very easy but nonetheless fun game, Yoshi's Woolly World has an impressive visual style paired with some great ideas. Unfortunately, the lack of challenge, some frustrating levels and its short ambitions hinder this creative game.

It’s the ludic equivalent of the James Bond series.

Yoshi’s Wooly World, won’t change how you look at games or lead you to any important insights. It wants nothing more than to perk you up a bit, to lighten your mental load.

There is nothing wrong with Yoshi's Woolly World. It's fun, progresses in difficulty and has everything one would expect from a Yoshi game, but it feels generic.

While Wooly World is mostly Yoshi's Island in a fuzzier package, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Its arts and crafts makeover may be mostly superficial, but by working with the parts of one of the world's greatest platformers, developer Good-Feel makes their recycling worthwhile.

Yoshi’s Wolly World is in every aspect an adorable designed platformer. Unfortunately the level design isn’t that exciting. It isn’t a new Super Mario Bros, but if you love to collect stuff and explore the stages you will find Yoshi’s Wolly World to be quite entertaining.

Woolly World is still a great game that is happy to welcome gamers of all skill levels into its cushy embrace. It is one of a few select titles that is easy to get lost in, and is good for what ails you if you’ve had a troubling day.

Easy, beautiful, and inventive. While the times it offers challenge are a little too spread out for my liking, the game looks and sounds stunning, and offers players a variety of new sights to experience along their journey.

Wooly World’s gentle accessibility, then, can be its biggest strength or most obvious weakness… depending on who you are. Either way, there is no doubting the craft.

A perfectly competent platformer, perhaps Yoshi’s best since Super Mario World 2, but one that is far less unique than its visuals suggest.

I’m really liking the idea of a “spiritual” series of yarn-based games, and would love to see more Nintendo properties go the same route as Epic Yarn and Woolly World. That said, they need to bring a little extra freshness of their own rather than walk over familiar ground, because this highly promising idea already runs the risk of submerging into mediocrity.

One of the weaker platformers for the Wii U where sadly a beautiful game can’t hide the rather poor level design.

This is a poor version of Mario’s platformers. Its quality is similar to them ... but maybe it would be good to change more than just a material.

Too much of it is cut from old cloth instead of woven from its own loom. [Aug 2015, p.116]

Quotation forthcoming.

When Yoshi’s Woolly World gets it right, it smashes it out of the park. Creative levels that tried different things such as transforming Yoshi into a plane, mermaid, or a racecar, is when that Nintendo sparkle shined its brightest. However, these moments of brilliance were overshadowed by a large amount of bland and unimaginative levels too focused on collecting.

There is the odd flourish of creativity, but it is hard not to feel like it's all been done before, and better. There's still plenty to enjoy, but it doesn't quite carve out its own identity. In short: it's finely crafted, if a bit woolly.

Excellent occasionally, good in parts and downright dull in others, Yoshi's Woolly World is a disappointment.