Simply put, this game is great. More babies=more fun!
The game starts with the evil magician Kamek kidnapping every baby in the world for some obscure reason, during transport, Baby Mario falls out of the sky and onto Yoshi’s back, and what’s a yoshi to do? Save the world with the aid of babies of course!
The game plays like it’s predecessor, but this time, the baby carriers seem to have butterfingers, because they drop more and more of them. You get 5 babies in total, Mario can hit certain blocks, make Yoshi run and can sometimes transform into Super Baby Mario, who can run on walls and is invincible. Peach can float using her parasol (or umbrella?) to glide or fly using conveniently placed fans, Donkey Kong can grip vines (and for those who saw The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, he can also drift), Wario can attract metal blocks and coins using his huge magnet and Bowser can shoot flames. The game uses these abilities well in the levels, that force you to switch often and even revisit previous ones to discover all the secrets.
The game doesn’t use a lot of the DS’s unique functionalities except for the two screens (more on that later) and the ideas fell kind of pre-used, for example, in the first Yoshi’s island, every boss was a huge version of a normal baddie (same in this one). At one place, you battled a boss caracter that was a huge balloon thing, but in this version it’s… A huge balloon thing with another one on top of it! OH SNAP! There is one particular boss that is really cool, You fight a giant ghost that is invisible, you can only see him upside down on the second screen, which is a giant mirror. The whole game takes places on both screens, no maps here, you can see a lot more of the environment, but you can’t see what’s going on in between the two screens, and most secrets are conveniently hidden in this area, coincidence? I think not. But it’s way easyer to shoot eggs (you can eat enemies and transform them into eggs) than if the two screen would be sticked together.
Yoshi’s Island DS is one really fun game, even if it didn’t change that much. If in any way, shape or form you liked the original on SNES or the re-release on GBA or if you are vaguely interested in platformers, I urge you to buy this game if you own a DS.