How Yoshi’s New Island shows that change ain't always bad

Yoshi’s New Island (2014)

Yoshi’s New Island (2014)

Call me unambitious, but I’m happiest in life when things are completely unchanging and I can settle down into the most monotonous of routines. In such a state, time passes pretty damn quickly, which some might find lamentable, but I say there’s nothing wrong with killing time and even wishing your life away.

After all, what are the two best things in modern life? Yes, eating great food and getting paid. And the more time you while away, the sooner lovely meals and nice paycheques come around.

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It’s probably for this reason that I didn’t play Yoshi’s New Island on 3DS until just recently, the game having come out in 2014. But if we’re truly honest, it might just as well have come out in 1995 for the Super Nintendo because all I’m seeing here is a tired old imitation of the original Yoshi’s Island.

I may qualify all of this by saying that I adore the original Yoshi’s Island, so a lot of this may come across as cock-eyed nostalgia. That’s understandable if you think so, but I would at least argue from a position of strength that the graphics of the SNES original are timeless - crayon, pastels, beautiful spritework, lovely cartoon backgrounds and a barrel-load of psychedelic effects.

Yoshi’s New Island on the other hand, looked hideously dated the moment it came out. In fact, the graphics look absolutely boak. If you’re an avid 3DS player, I’m sure you never bother using the 3D slider for most games, but even the very small added pop that 3D gives to this game is too much - it’s nausea in three dimensions.

This is a game where you play as the green dinosaur Yoshi, set many years in the past, and the goal is to reunite Baby Mario, who sits permanently astride Yoshi, with Baby Luigi. You see, a stork was on its way to bring the newly born Mario Bros. to their parents, which is a little different to how our awkward old sex-ed classes portrayed the deed.

You will notice of course that this is the exact same story as Yoshi’s Island SNES; except here, there’s a slight twist, and the stork gets the wrong house or something. It completely undoes and undermines the heartfelt ending of the Super Nintendo game, which is rather annoying.

It gets worse. The game is such a retread of the original Yoshi’s Island that, if you have any knowledge of it, you already know what the next level is going to be. Everything in the game is so sadly predictable. Oh look, the third level is in a cave. Oh look, the second world introduces Koopa Troopas and has a Castle full of Boos. Oh, would you believe it, world five is the snow world.

Everything is just so much blander as well - when you get to the sixth world of six, there’s not even a cool warping sequence to Baby Bowser’s castle, like on the Super Nintendo - you just sort of go up a mountain and do some of the (surprise) lava and cave levels. I have previously slaughtered New Super Mario Bros. for always beating the same drum over and over again, but at least those games actually do offer something new, at least every now and again.

In Yoshi’s New Island, there are only really two new mechanics: at very few points in the game, you can fire either giant eggs or metal eggs, which moreorless do the same thing as each other in that they smash through materials that you couldn’t ordinarily get through.

And then there are vehicle transformations, which were always terrific fun in the SNES game, but of course New Island had to mess them up by trying something odd - the vehicle sequences are entirely separate to the regular levels, and worse than that, you’ve got to use the 3DS gyro sensor and move your handheld around in order to move through the sequence. I don’t know how a game could possibly mess up turning into a Yoshicopter, but they managed it.

You know what else they messed up? Actually, two very objectionable things, but I’ll start with the music. Oh me, oh my, what can I say about the music? How best to sum it up? Alright, have you ever played a kazoo? You sometimes get them in Christmas crackers or vending machines or the like. They are maybe fun for about 10 seconds, and then they become bloody annoying.

Well, someone in their infinite wisdom decided to make the kazoo the backbone of this game’s soundtrack, and the result is possibly the worst soundtrack you will have heard in a Nintendo game. Even the ancient old NES stuff is more palatable. It’s not just the music either, but the direction - it’s bad enough that the kazoo music and the same horrid theme plays everywhere, but there’s simply no variety to it. The most milquetoast, middling theme plays in the caves, the castles, even the boss fights.

Oh God, don’t get me started on the boss fights. That’s the other thing I was going to mention, another reason to laugh at the game. Every one of the six worlds has two castle stages, each with a boss at the end. That means 16 bosses, and in the SNES game, that meant 16 cool, unique bosses, their sprites warped this way and that by the powers of the Super FX 2 chip contained within the game’s cartridge.

In Yoshi’s New Island, Kamek the evil Magikoopa is the boss for eight of those castles, and the other eight - well, not a single one of them is a patch on the memorable bosses of Yoshi’s Island. There’ll be no travelling to the moon to take on the giant raven, I can tell you.

God, I hated this game. And I could instance a whole load of things I specifically hate. I hate the delay when Yoshi goes to throw an egg. I hate that no animation or sound effect occurs when you have no eggs, but try to throw one. I hate that the controls are delayed, almost unresponsive, meaning your brain will almost certainly move faster than the game’s controls, unless you are 5 years old in which case you are most probably the target audience for this game.

I hate that many of the collectables in every single level are hidden in invisible item balls and you have to jump everywhere like a fool to find them. I hate that they haven’t even drawn any art for each of the levels. I hate that all of the sound effects are a slapdash mishmash of Yoshi’s Island, but mostly Yoshi’s Story and Yoshi’s Island DS, including those tired old Yoshi voice effects that we’ve been hearing since 1997.

I hate that there are no more bonus levels and minigames when you finish a level. I hate that it takes Yoshi a second too long to get moving at full speed. I hate that the final boss is, for some reason, the adult Bowser travelling through space and time to fight you for some stupid reason.

Yeah, I hate the fact that I can drop a spoiler like that and nobody will even care. I hate this game, and I hate the fact that they think they can release bad mockeries of the original Yoshi’s Island. I may hate change as well, but anything’s better than this mundane mess. Change ain’t always a bad thing, guys - maybe something original next time, with graphics and music that don’t make me wanna hurl.

16 January 2026