After years away from this game, I thought "oh, I've gotten significantly better at matchy puzzle games. This will allow Dr Mario to innovate by making it a Vs Puzzler, my favorite version of the puzzle! And I actually understand the cute Wario Land 3 theming! It'll be great!"
It is incredible that the game manages to be inferior to the original in almost every way - and I don't even care for classic Dr. Mario all that much! Every addition that the title makes outside of the vitamin drop preview is to its detrement. The Story Mode proves to be a rather agonizing slog, especially on higher difficulties where it increases the virus count in addition to the CPU difficulty, which merely prolongs games and highlights the massive issue the game has. The "garbage" system of the game, rewarding you by hindering your opponent when you do a cool combo, is to rain two randomly-colored pill parts on two random columns. However, as Dr. Mario is a methodical game of adaptation, this does not create a situation that pressures your opponent - it either has a chance of nothing happening or, more than likely, causing them to just have to work around it for a little bit. The issue being that every single time it plays a slooooow animation as garbage sloooowly rains from the sky, but not in a way that better pressures your opponent. It is incredibly difficult to eliminate yourself via clogging the play area in Dr. Mario, meaning that the end goal for both players is to simply prolong the match and waste the other player's time as much as possible, which is... really decidedly unfun and goes against the point of a lot of Vs-style showdowns. When it expands to four players - a requirement for the penultimate fight of Story Mode - sprites are squashed to an eye-straining degree and garbage allocation is dependent on the color of the pills that caused the combo... which is often too slow a process to be targeted, turning the entire affair to be heavily reliant on random spawns if you get to play the game at a remotely decent pace. Dr. Mario is an inherently alright puzzle game, but this adds surprisingly little and the main attraction is flawed in a way that's difficult to repair.
Rudy has surprisingly good music, though.
It is incredible that the game manages to be inferior to the original in almost every way - and I don't even care for classic Dr. Mario all that much! Every addition that the title makes outside of the vitamin drop preview is to its detrement. The Story Mode proves to be a rather agonizing slog, especially on higher difficulties where it increases the virus count in addition to the CPU difficulty, which merely prolongs games and highlights the massive issue the game has. The "garbage" system of the game, rewarding you by hindering your opponent when you do a cool combo, is to rain two randomly-colored pill parts on two random columns. However, as Dr. Mario is a methodical game of adaptation, this does not create a situation that pressures your opponent - it either has a chance of nothing happening or, more than likely, causing them to just have to work around it for a little bit. The issue being that every single time it plays a slooooow animation as garbage sloooowly rains from the sky, but not in a way that better pressures your opponent. It is incredibly difficult to eliminate yourself via clogging the play area in Dr. Mario, meaning that the end goal for both players is to simply prolong the match and waste the other player's time as much as possible, which is... really decidedly unfun and goes against the point of a lot of Vs-style showdowns. When it expands to four players - a requirement for the penultimate fight of Story Mode - sprites are squashed to an eye-straining degree and garbage allocation is dependent on the color of the pills that caused the combo... which is often too slow a process to be targeted, turning the entire affair to be heavily reliant on random spawns if you get to play the game at a remotely decent pace. Dr. Mario is an inherently alright puzzle game, but this adds surprisingly little and the main attraction is flawed in a way that's difficult to repair.
Rudy has surprisingly good music, though.