New Super Luigi U for evaluation

New Super Luigi U

         He is the ubiquitous player two, and eternal second banana. Luigi has branched into his own series of ghost catching escapades, but before now he's never really held the leading role in a platforming adventure. This expansion for the enjoyable, if safe New Super Mario Bros U aims to not only fix that, but provide the Mario veteran with a meatier challenge. The man in green sure makes his case compelling, and shows the rest of the gaming world what being a DLC can mean.

          The game is designed with experienced players in mind, at least someone who comfortably finished the base game. With an expectation that the basics are ingrained in your muscles by now, Luigi throws you right into the action and turns it on it's head. Luigi has his trademark slippery traction and higher jump that demand a bit more precision from the player, and the shorter, more action and enemy packed levels keep the pressure on with a 100 second time limit. Such a demanding timer keeps the pressure on the player, and while never feeling truly limiting, does demand quicker thinking to locate the trickier star coins or how to reach them. 

     Though the game reuses assets from the base title, the ways they get used breath new life into familiar objects and enemies. The stone eyed pillars that Mario strolled past before now charge into a Luigi ready to confidently vault over them. Giant wigglers march to their doom as Luigi needs to bounce vertically off their backs to stay out of rising poison water nipping at his heels, and Luigi is forced to do his best Tarzan impression over waves of crashing lava and squadrons of dry bones. New, interesting challenges are consistently offered and make players think on their feet about how to proceed. 

      Face offs with the Koopalings and Boom-boom in the fortress stages receive no love however, and the main challenge with them comes from reaching them in the first place.  Some of the hiding places for secret exits can be flat out devious, and next to impossible to locate without a guide, even with them being in all the same levels as the wholesale copied overworld. Luigi's slippery controls don't always leave the player feeling like death was their fault, and some may find it frustrating that they lost a hard earned power up to an errant goomba that Luigi just stopped a pixel too late to avoid. 

     At $20 to download, New Super Luigi U takes a good game and makes it solid. Overhauling all 80+ levels and making the same assets feel fresh make it a great value and at it's best the game can channel Lost Levels and Super Mario Bros 3. Less attentive players may find the difficulty jump and physics change a bit jarring, but old fans of the plumbing duo will feel more than vindicated by Luigi's latest. He's-a-Luigi, Number one!

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general feedback as usual. If anyone has suggestions on how to rewrite paragraph 4 I would love to hear them, I'm not really happy with it. 

Hello there, darkspineslayer! Thanks so much for your submission.

One of the things I liked most about your review is that it's trite and straight-forward -- and very descriptive.  A lot of user and professional reviews go this route as a means of elaborating on their overall opinion of specific elements of a game that they liked and didn't like, and I've found over the years that readers appreciate getting a handle on specific bits of information without having to ask a lot of questions.  If you prefer this style of writing, I encourage you to keep at it.  Yet, might I offer some advice? I've noticed that you haven't given us YOUR thoughts on the game.  There's really nothing wrong with that, and GameSpot staff reviewers rarely ever coin their personal feelings in regards to game reviews.  I'm a firm believer that any game review with personal insight on an individual experience is a great way for the reviewer to truly connect with their readers. I feel it's important to foster that relationship between the author and the audience.  You build on that relationship, and foster a great deal of trust---which in turn promotes you as someone who understands the material on an interpersonal level.

That being said, your writing style is great.  I like it.  However, I did notice some problems with sentence structuring.  For example;  " Such a demanding timer keeps the pressure on the player, and while never feeling truly limiting, does demand quicker thinking to locate the trickier star coins or how to reach them. "  You have the best of intentions, but I couldn't really get a grasp of what you were trying to convey because the sentence was all over the place.  So, here's a suggestion:

"The in-game timer doesn't feel truly limiting, but it demands quicker thinking from the player when it comes to locating and reaching trickier star coins."

As far as the fourth and last paragraph.....

 At $20 to download, New Super Luigi U takes a good game and makes it solid. Overhauling all 80+ levels and making the same assets feel fresh make it a great value and at it's best the game can channel Lost Levels and Super Mario Bros 3. Less attentive players may find the difficulty jump and physics change a bit jarring, but old fans of the plumbing duo will feel more than vindicated by Luigi's latest. He's-a-Luigi, Number one!

What you have here is fine, but I would suggest ending on a personal note.  What I mean by that is; tell us in a few short sentences (or maybe more) what YOU thought of the game.  As I said earlier, tell us why YOU liked it, and explain in closing why your experiences compel you to recommend the game to someone else.  Conversely, if you were to write a negative review on a game, consider the same strategies; tell the reader why you hated the game, and convince them not to waste their hard earned money.

Anyway, hope I've been of some help to you.  Above all things, keep the love of writing in your heart, and keep up the good work!

Thank you for your thoughts.

You know, you raise an interesting point. I've always thought of reviews somewhat like an informative/persuasive essay, but it does seem a little impersonal at times. Maybe I've just assumed that by writing the review I was sharing my experiences.

Perhaps you would like to take a look at this older review of mine and elaborate further on that point?

 http://systemwarsmagazine.com/2013/04/01/review-god-of-war-ascension/