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Yoshi has a long history of enjoyable platformers yet he's never quite reached the high notes of his SNES classic Yoshi's Island since it debuted. Does Yoshi's Crafted World have what it takes to make him a platforming superstar yet again?

When I first started playing Yoshi's Crafted World, its distinct visual style of paper crafts come to life immediately reminded me of Media Molecule's fantastic 3D platformer Tearaway. However, Yoshi's Crafted World has something that Tearaway doesn't: Yoshis! Watching the little cuties run, jump, and flutter around is a treat and I particularly enjoyed the brief albeit memorable cutscenes that have the little fellows interact and react to surprising circumstances. Plus, being able to dress them up in oversized costumes (many of which can be unlocked by scanning certain amiibo) offers plenty of goofy fun. On the audio side, you'll hear plenty of familiar Yoshi noises as he charges his egg throws and flutters his little legs while the music is charming yet not as catchy as previous entries in the series.

Adorable graphics and sound aside, how does Yoshi's Crafted World set itself apart from other games in the franchise? For starters, it has a semi-3D element in that you can throw eggs at objects in the backgrounds and foregrounds and even travel up and down pathways to change lanes. It's still very much a 2D platformer but these touches definitely give it a whole new dimension, literally.

The core gameplay of Yoshi's Crafted World isn't far removed from what you'd expect although it does feature plenty of twists that keep its campaign feeling fresh. You'll encounter many different kinds of stages and segments throughout the campaign such as automatically scrolling levels, a stage where you can only see shadows whenever a screen slides in the way, and portions that have you control certain vehicles or ride everyone's favourite pup: Poochy! This amount of variety definitely makes for one fulfilling adventure.

Yoshi's Crafted World's campaign is uniquely designed as well. First of all, you'll reach a point early on where you can choose various paths on the world map that each include a precious jewel at the end and the goal of the campaign is to retrieve them all. Having this non-linear level structure is great as not many platformers allow you to have this much freedom. As you play through levels, you'll amass a collection of hidden Smiley Flowers that are also earned through finishing levels at full health as well as after collecting 100 regular coins and all 20 hidden red coins. Some stages are played like mini arcade games where you have to reach certain score thresholds to earn Smiley Flowers. Anyway, these flowers are used to unlock more levels so earning enough is crucial if you want to progress further.

Believe it or not, there's plenty of replay value within Yoshi's Crafted World's campaign in addition to collecting everything in each stage. Almost every stage allows you play it again in reverse while trying to collect all of the Poochy Pups which is as fun as it is adorable. There are also 121 hidden crafts that you can collect to fill out a rewarding catalog as well as toy vending machines that grant you costumes and such by spending your hard-earned coins. You could spend dozens of hours and still have a lot more to see and do.

Although it sounds like an excellent game, Yoshi's Crafted World unfortunately has its fair share of faults. Primarily, it's far too easy even for a Nintendo platformer. Not only can you breeze through the majority of the campaign while almost never biting the dust, some of the stages can be downright boring. For example, controlling a giant automatically moving Yoshi by merely punching up, down, or straight ahead made me want to fall asleep. Also, the arcade-style stages where you have to earn points are more tedious than many NES Zapper games. Next, I enjoy playing cooperatively but many co-op mechanics here are irritating to deal with. Accidentally hopping on each other's backs or eating each other made me and my gaming pal almost constantly annoyed, especially during crucial moments.

Finally, even though Yoshi's Crafted World is an extremely easy game, it also has many 'what the heck do I do now?' moments. There were more than a few times when progressing through a stage or defeating a boss required a very specific yet unclear set of steps and wandering around while trying to figure these situations out just isn't fun. For example, you may have walked by a key object that you needed or not noticed a side path and a couple of bosses even require some outside the box thinking to defeat although they're still technically very easy. These sorts of key steps could have definitely been highlighted in a more intuitive way.

Yoshi's Crafted World is one of the cutest games that you'll ever play but it's incredibly easy to the point where it becomes unengaging. That being said, the amount of variety and replay value is top-notch and that makes the familiar gameplay really shine.

• + Familiar Yoshi gameplay yet with an interesting 3D element and plenty of twists
• + Adorable visuals and music
• + Lots of stages, variety, and replay value

• - Little sense of challenge and some stages are just plain boring
• - Co-op mechanics can be irritating
• - Plenty of 'what do I do?' moments

Gentle and generous, Good-Feel delivers its best game yet in this imaginative and breezy platformer.

The key word here, really, is craft. It's there, first of all, in the aesthetics of this, Good-Feel's second outing with Yoshi (or third if you want to be really picky and include the 3DS offshoot with Poochy). This a world of lollipop sticks and sticky-back plastic, where discarded cereal boxes stand in for rolling mountains and cardboard clouds are suspended on lengths of string; a world where Shy Guys blow into straws to keep ping pong balls afloat so that you can skip along them to your goal.

Yoshi's Crafted World review

• Developer: Good-Feel
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Platform: Switch
• Availability: Out March 29th on Switch

It's there, embedded a little deeper, in what's a meticulously engineered side-scrolling platformer - perhaps the best to have come from Nintendo since 2012's Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. It's certainly Good-Feel's finest creation yet, a world away from the slightly stale Yoshi's Wooly World, a game that ended up feeling as stuffy and insubstantial as a dusty cotton ball. Crafted World, meanwhile, feels fresh and full of ideas, its levels happily rifling through quick sketches and one-shot concepts before it moves briskly onto the next.

Yoshi's Crafted World's best trick is getting to the essence of what made the original Yoshi's Island so beloved. Somewhat incredibly, it feels like the first Yoshi game in nearly a quarter of a century and over five follow-ups that really understands what made the original sing, and it's then bold enough to place its own spin. Yoshi's Island was always a brilliantly tangible, physical game, brought alive by its tactile surfaces - the chalklines, the paper and the clay - and this time out Good-Feel have simply taken to another corner of the stationery cupboard, pulling out cardboard, string and fizzy pop straws to create its own colourful dioramas.

It's a more cohesive, coherent aesthetic than the half-hearted Wooly World, or even of that game's superior predecessor Kirby's Epic Yarn. These worlds feel like they've been constructed over long summer afternoons on living room floors or stretched out across garden patios, with a human touch - and a dash of tilt shift focus - making them feel oh so real. Maybe it's the influence of that corner of Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters that's busying itself with cardboard wonders as it conjures up new Labo creations, as Yoshi's Crafted World displays a mastery of its simulated materials.

Yoshi's Crafted World Review Embargo

And so it presents a world that demands to be played with and poked at, as is underlined by one of the few tweaks to Yoshi's established moveset. You can now aim your eggs at objects in the foreground and in the far distance, bulls-eyeing cut-out clouds or shy-guys peering out from behind the scenery. In another neat trick, levels each have flipsides available once you've completed them, where you track down three poochies while the sellotape, blu-tack and string that holds up the level's primary form is all exposed.

It's a world that invites languid, inquisitive exploration - there are no time limits here, other than in those flipped levels - and each element pulls towards that more laid-back vibe. Yoshi has chilled with age, settling into the stoner rhythm of stablemate Kirby in games that don't really offer any challenge but go out of their way to reward the curious. The challenge here is softer than ever before, but on the flip side the collectibles are more numerous, and often more ingenious

Yoshi himself is a sedate avatar, lacking the agility or momentum of Mario - he appears to have slowed even more since his last outing - but that's almost beside the point. He's there to flutter softly through levels, popping enemies in his mouth before spitting them out in a neat succession of experiments and illustrations of cause and effect. Jump on a foot pump and it'll blast air into an inflatable cat that will scare down the mice in the rafters that are hoarding the key that you need; fire an egg at a boulder in the distance and it'll roll down the hill and clear the landslide that's in your path; stomp a flower encased in ice down into the cold waters below and it'll float across to the monkey waiting by a fishing hole with a rod just down the way who'll then pass it up by way of thanks. This is a video game designed to idly wander through rather than butt up against, and it's all the more glorious for it.

Yoshi's Crafted World Review Roundup

It's not perfect, of course. There's not the jolt of the new that the original Yoshi's Island had, and even if Crafted World is less reliant on old ideas as its immediate predecessor there's no escaping the fact it's riffing off something very familiar. Around the edges there's the kind of flab and excess that wouldn't blight a true classic - Crafted World's eagerness to fill its world with collectibles can go a little too far with the 300 odd crafts and costumes available in gacha machines that pepper the overworld map, and even though there's no real world money involved it's jarring to play a Yoshi game which has folded in the loot box's close relative. The soundtrack, too, is twee to the point of being syrupy, a sweet dirge that grates all too quickly.

Yoshi's Crafted World Review Famitsu

Still, that doesn't hold back Yoshi's Crafted World from being a fine achievement. It's a scrolling platformer with an abundance of style and imagination, and a pleasingly laid-back adventure with an ocean of depth to explore. It is, first and foremost, a work born of mastery and a keen attention to detail. This is a game of impeccable, readily appreciable craft.