Mario & Yoshi is a fast-paced NES puzzle game in which you must mix and match falling characters and piece together eggshells to free the Yoshi trapped inside.

In the early 90s presumably following the success of Tetris our friends at Nintendo went through a phase of releasing one falling block puzzler after another. Dr Mario, Yoshi’s Cookie and Wario’s Woods are key examples of this. Many gamers will no doubt have forgotten this puzzler simply known as ‘Yoshi’ in America or ‘Mario & Yoshi’ in Europe which saw a release on both the NES and Gameboy due to its uninspiring and unchallenging gameplay.

The gameplay is quite simple really; the player controls either Mario or Luigi and has to try to keep blocks with monsters inside which fall from the top of the screen from piling high enough to reach the top. Mario and Luigi try to prevent an untimely demise by switching the different columns of enemy characters so they are positioned under different falling objects. If there is a chain of monsters within two Yoshi egg shells, the egg shells will merge and a Yoshi will form, adding points and eliminating a group of monsters. The larger the chain of monsters between the two eggshells, the more powerful the Yoshi that is created will be.

Using Mario to switch blocks around feels much more cumbersome than a game like Tetris were you can control the blocks directly. For instance there are a few occasions were you might want to get a stack of blocks on the left over to the right hand side of the pit, this requires you to make several switching manoeuvres . This process however disrupts other stacks in your path which is a bit of a frustration. The game design itself doesn’t lend itself to neat orderly block arrangement such as found in Tetris or Dr Mario.

The game itself is pretty uninspiring on the whole, it’s a competent puzzler but it somehow fails to excite. The action plods along without any real sense of challenge, within a few minutes you feel like you have seen it all. Falling block puzzlers are all repetitive by nature, but someone ‘Yoshi’ feels even more so due to how easy it is.