One of the things that committed me to buying a Nintendo Switch was the promise of a new Yoshi game for the console. It's hard to believe that it's now been almost two years since I bought the Switch, but earlier this year (pre all the transplant dramas), Yoshi's Crafted World came out.

Although I finished the main story a while ago, it's only now that I had the time and steady hands to actually finish it 100%.

Crafted World is a decent Yoshi game, but it didn't live up to the expectations that the excellent Woolly World set 4 years ago. I know Yoshi games are targeted towards younger audiences – that's part of what I love about them – but I think they went a bit far in simplifying things for this game.

The stages were ok, but rarely challenging, and the depth of the game was mainly just the find-the-poochy-pups reverse stages, and tedious collect-a-thons of finding items in each stage and hitting them with an egg.

Speaking of hitting things with eggs: the other mechanic that never really worked for me was the new Z-axis depth for hitting things with eggs that were in the foreground or background. The controls for this never really gelled and was the source of a lot of frustration, especially with complicated moves like hovering and attempting to hit something on that axis.

Nevertheless, the challenge that was included were the difficult 'Hidden Hills'  stages, but they were disappointingly few: only 3 similar-ish levels and a recycled compilation boss battle. In comparison, Woolly World had the one special stage per-world.

The soundtrack was also disappointingly repetitive, but despite all of the above criticisms, I don't think Crafted World is a bad game. Woolly World had set a very high bar, and I don't think Crafted World got close enough to matching it.

After finishing Crafted World, it makes me want a Switch re-release of Yoshi's Woolly World even more...