As someone that enjoyed Yoshi's Woolly World on the Wii U, I was pretty excited to go into this title. Overall the game retained it's adorable charm and presentation that made the predecessor so fantastic. While it has some bloody clever level design, in some areas more than the prior game, it overall doesn't have the consistent feeling of "this is awesome!" that I got from Woolly World. It almost feels as if 3/4 of the way through they just wanted to get this out on shelves. Some of the best design ideas get used once in a level and then never revisited. To be fair I feel this is more just a rating based upon knowing that they could have presented a more developed game. I got the sense while playing it that the devs were really enjoying what they were making and getting really inventive, and then after I beat it I was left pondering the serious amount of unrealized potential that was present. I genuinely hope they do another one in this game series for the Switch and this time give it the kind of treatment we would expect from something like say Yoshi's Island. Good job, but I know you can do better.

Yoshi's Crafted World is an impossibly special game. The level design, visual style, and gameplay variety is in another UNIVERSE compared to a lot of its contemporaries, I seriously cannot stress this enough.

The game offers so much in terms of collectible content, and while 100% completing the game might stretch the experience a bit thin, going for a lot of them but not pushing it is an incredible experience that rewards you for exploring the levels, learning the tricks of the wonderfully unique environments and soaking in the luxuriously crafted (pun intended) atmosphere.

The soundtrack is a tad grating and lacks variety, but I like the main theme's melody enough to where this wasn't a huge issue for me. Of course the game isn't particularly hard, but looking for all the different types of collectibles in the insane variety of environments that the game provides you is certainly a challenge, because some are hidden damn well. Each level is designed to be played from multiple angles, increasing the amount of detail and bumping the crafts aesthetic up to the umpteenth degree. The souvenir collectibles turn it into a platforming I-Spy game, which works incredibly with the visual style and provides a lot of rich environmental detail.

These environments are also ridiculously varied, as the game is split into well over a dozen smaller worlds each with their own unique theme, and the levels in those worlds are also super varied, meaning that no two levels are alike visually or mechanically, with tons of level-specific mechanics.

On top of the platforming levels having diverse environments, the gameplay is also shaken up quite a few times with mini-game-esque, high score based levels that are entirely too fun. You might go on a monty mole hunt, pilot a plane through an aerial minefield, or even do a solar-powered race in a bottle car (my personal favorite).

I just had a blast with this game from start to finish, and I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.

This game lives or dies by how much you value charm. The aesthetic is absolutely choice. It’s creative and every detail is worth taking a few seconds to comb over resulting in an earned “aww well that’s nice.” It genuinely takes me back to being a kid going ham with the bristol board. Gameplay is split into 3 parts. First being the regular level to level completion. It’s got the blinding polish you'd expect from a nintendo 2D platformer, except about a thousand times easier. The second is the reverse side of every completed stage which is a time trial to find The Poochy Pups. This part is quite a bit of fun, but, while I think seeing what all of the crafts were made out of is a funny concept, all the levels end up just looking like more bland versions of the stage it’s based off of. I can only laugh at the idea of Yoshi-O’s or whatever so many times. Lastly there is searching for crafts, which can only be done when both the aforementioned levels in a world are completed. This ends up being the most optional and most tedious gameplay option. You are given quite a few things to find in the levels, but are only allowed to find them one at a time. This leads to going through levels upwards to 5 times just looking for crap in the background. It’s the most braindead part of an already trivial game. It can be fun when you just wanna dink around for a bit, but doing it all in succession kind of messes up the pacing. This game, with all of its game modes, is quite long. A lot longer than you’d expect. It really wrings dry every conceivable gimmick you could apply this art direction to.

This game makes me feel like a baby child (complementary).

Not necessarily a perfect platformer, but it was definitely a lot more challenging than I expected. That secret final boss is a real jerk, and I never actually beat it... anyway, it's a fun game to complete, but not very fun to master. The outfits are pretty cute and the environments are really beautiful and creative, and there are some really fun level concepts that I didn't expect from a cute little game like this.

If you do try to 100% it, it gets really repetitive and doesn't really feel worth it, unfortunately. I kind of gave up after a while, since it's a lot of squinting at the background for the objects you're supposed to hit with an egg or something like that. I'd say it's worth checking out the demo and seeing if you like it, at least.

I ended up quitting this halfway through out of apathy.

What's here isn't terrible but it's the epitome of a 5/10. None of its new mechanics meaningfully contribute to gameplay and feel as if they exist just to be marketable quirks. The collectibles are less fun to earn here than prior Yoshi's and now that you're REQUIRED to collect them for progression, it's hard to care.

Best I can say is that I do like the arts and crafts aesthetic and it ties into the platforming pretty well. I also like replaying the levels to see the reverse sides of the stage cause you can see what materials and objects the levels are made out of - cereal boxes, balloons, etc. That said, it lacks the loving care and passion that makes Woolly World's art direction so impactful.

At 60 dollars, your money is better spent on literally any other 1st party switch game, and your time is better spent with Yoshi's Island or Woolly World.

Yoshi's Crafted World is easily the second best Yoshi game released, and unfortunately that's not a huge deal. Yoshi's Crafted World has a great basic gameplay loop heavily hindered by QoL issues and repetition. Crafted World could comfortably be two or three worlds shorter without the game feeling empty.

One of the big aspects of Yoshi's Crafted World is the souvenir collecting, basically going through past levels and searching the background and foreground for specific crafts to collect. This is a great idea that encourages players to actually enjoy the well-crafted scenery! Unfortunately, pretty much every course in the game has at least three souvenirs and you can only receive them one at a time. This means that souvenir collecting is a ton of overworld conversations rather than allowing the player to get a longer list and just go through courses crossing them off. Combined with the 43 courses in the game, this is exhaustive to the point where I would only play one world per session.

Like most Yoshi games, there's a steep difficulty curve at the end of the game, and the secret boss challenge run is one of the hardest missions I've had in any Nintendo game. It's unfortunate that it's muddled by being tired of the game well before you get to that point. Additionally, someone can let Nintendo know that Yoshi games are allowed to have real soundtracks again.

Crafted World makes better use of the thematic gimmick than either Epic Yarn or Woolly World, and the levels are incredible in how they look, bringing to mind the aesthetic of LittleBigPlanet of practical crafting. There's also a huge variety in the crafting materials, from yarn to scrap metal to recycled cans and boxes, it's an incredibly immersive experience. One of my favorite details is the bosses being introduced in stop-motion crafting.

All said, Yoshi's Crafted World is not the best game on the Switch by far, and with Yoshi's Island on the SNES Online feature it's not even the best Yoshi game on the Switch. It's a fun and gorgeous game, still, particularly towards the end when the game ramps up the difficulty. It's a game worth checking out but one that could end up tiring the player before they beat it.

I can't really think of a full pros/cons chart because I actually played this game quite a while ago (I think late 2019/early 2020) and only just now got around to finishing the final boss. I appreciate good-feel's decision to significantly alter the gameplay of the yoshi's island series after their by-the-numbers yoshi's woolly world, but this game really does not hit the mark. the game attempts to draw from the 2.5D gameplay seen in yoshi's story on n64, where yoshi can move on paths into the foreground and background when the game allows. yoshi can also hit objects in the foreground and background with his eggs, and by proxy this means that yoshi's aiming has now become a controllable cursor rather than an automatically-moving one as in previous games. this slows down the pace considerably and can feel unreliable due to the many targetable objects on each stage. the stage gimmicks fail to use this in interesting ways and instead provide an odd mish-mash of concepts that mostly confuse rather than excite.

other than the main gameplay, the collectables endemic to yoshi's island have proliferated far beyond the bounds of reason, with some stages hitting a flower count in the double digits if my memory serves correctly. these now serve as a block for further progression, so simply ignoring them will not allow you to proceed (usual YI challenges like having full health at the end of a level or getting all red coins also give a flower). much like woolly world, the puzzles and challenges for getting these flowers are repeated often and become tired quickly. there are also several minigame levels; nothing too crazy but also not really annoying either. for side content you can play each level in reverse searching for poochies, and you can also replay levels searching for specific objects in the background to hit. neither set of missions hold any particular interest for me. otherwise this was a suitable podcast game and nothing more. I definitely recommend you listen to at least something else in the background, as the music is absolutely off-key/horrid and tracks are repeated often. not a great game to be honest.

I have no idea why I 100 percented Crafted World, but I did. I guess they tried to do what they did with Woolly World, but its not at all the same. The levels are creative from a setting a detail perspective, but unimaginative from any other standpoint. Maybe it's just more of a completionist's slumberfest, since the real issue for me came with having to get every red coin and then go back a second time to get the Poochy pups. It just wasn't fun and felt more like a chore. Overall, I'm going to assume just playing the game normally would make it alright. Even then, I wouldn't say it's worth 60 dollars or be considered anything mind blowing.