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This hack is mostly playable without saves, but you'll want to use them against most bosses. Aside from the occasional cheap bosses, though, it's a solid hack, and the borrowed tilesets are stunning. The music has a few tunes that sound mind-rendingly wrong, but most of it is good; the castles' music is exceptional, because it's from Journey to Silius. This is a nice, even hack that I'd recommend to all Mario fans.

When I heard for the first time about a hack of Super Mario World where Toad is playing the central character I was quite excited. As I can remeber, since the year one, Toad has always been the little dumb bag carrier of Princess Peach who stood in the last row. Though he's obviously some kind of mushroom he was in the Mushroom Kingdom itself just the eternal loser. But things have changed with this hack, at least for me ...

The level design is well done and consists of different Mario games and others which I didnt't know before. As in Super Mario Wold you have to play through different worlds and levels to advance to the castle of each world. Some levels are easy, some of average difficulty and some are hard - especially some bosses. In most cases you need to find out first how to defeat the boss or what its weak spot is. For that reason I claim that you need more than one try to defeat each boss. Besides some of them look a little strange, or better said what they are.

In my opinion the music fits to the game very well either. Many sounds were quite familiar to me like Donkey Kong, Super Metroid or Kirby. Especially the sound of "Brinstar" in some caves gave me the creeps and still jingles in my ears.

All in all the game is a lot of fun and worth playing it, or at least you should give it a try when you're a fan of Mario game designs and of course of Toad. However it lacks a little regarding the story. But since it's no role playing game I have no problems to overlook that issue. It doesn't decline the fun factor at all.

Ah, Toad....Toady....little mushroom boy, whatever you wanna call him. Sure feels like a slightly underappreciated character to me since it's rare you get to play him. Well, here's an adventure entirely for him! And it's....slightly underwhelming 0.o Don't get me wrong, it's not a BAD hack or anything, but it left me feeling a bit unfulfilled.

WORLD: Well alright, standard Mario fare, though the world is primarily constructed from assets from other games, primarily graphics and such. It is a pretty bright world and fits in with Toad's fairly innocent personality. Music is pretty good in most places too...except the two desert levels. Forgive me, but I HATED the music in those two places!

GAMEPLAY: I think this is where I start feeling unfulfilled, actually. Gameplay is again, typical Mario fare, but in-levels feels more like Super Mario Bros. 3. You can't carry a secondary item in case you take a hit, which is fine as this hack isn't OVERLY hard, but it does take a slightly sharp difficulty spike during World 5 when ? Blocks oddly enough become very rare. But one issue I have with the levels is the feeling of inconsistency. The Sky World and Desert World both are significantly shorter than the others, almost like levels were thrown in to make quota, so to speak, but they can be finished in a minute or so with minimal effort. Again, not BAD, but it just feels a bit off. My bigger issue and likely the reason I feel like I do is due to the author's claims of it being basically a new game...and yet very little feels actually unique. Several message boxes seem to hint at a new mechanic or something with vague warnings of "Be careful of water" or "Don't jump too far into the sky" and yet...nothing comes of them, which would utterly defeat the purpose of having the message boxes for anything at all. Now granted, there ARE some mechanic changes, such as you needing to find bubbles or else you drown in one water level, the fact that you jump higher in all the sky levels, or the ice crystals falling from the sky in the Ice World that freeze you in place for a few seconds (that one I rather liked and thought cool), but I wasn't exactly thrilled with the bee hive later in the game and using Squawks to navigate, nor the sudden spaceship level where you fly up through a fortress. It doesn't feel unique and it simply just comes up to change mechanics once and doesn't feel natural. Honestly, this game would have been fine being just a game starring Toad with a few innovative mechanics, but this uses so many random ones that I'm not quite feeling it.

STORY: Toad is playing in the woods and goes on an adventure! Least that's what I think the story is. SMW is never big on story, but this game does seem to try and imply one, but it doesn't come across very well, I don't think. I believe Toad is trying to find out why his friends are disappearing and such.

FUN: Well, for the most part it does feel fun. Playing as Toad is a bit of a novel idea since he's never been the hero of....well....much of anything. And the gameplay does feel significantly more like SMB3 as opposed to SMW, but that's fine since that's another great game all the same. I just found myself wanting a bit more out of this hack is all.

MY OVERALL RATING: 6.5/10 Maybe I'm being too harsh on this and forgive me if I am. I do like playing as Toad, I do like how colorful and pleasant the game feels, and the music is all pretty fitting for a grand adventure. But for a game touted as "basically being a new game", it feels too similar to other games and yet doesn't feel like it does enough to set it apart from anything else. Many levels are all essentially the same as one another and hardly show much variation from one another. New mechanics, while somewhat varied, just feel too random and/or sudden to feel like part of the gameworld half the time. A good effort, just needs a bit more consistency and clarity on various aspects.

I was thrilled to see such a polished looking hack starring Toad, as I'm super fond of the character, and adore hacks that change out the playable characters.

For the most part, this is a very well made hack with some good level design, good aesthetics, and very fitting music from other SNES games.

However, there's a pretty big blemish on this game. The hitboxes are super bugged. More times than I can count, I was killed by things that were not even close to touching me. The game even hitches up for a second and sort of pulls Toad closer before playing the death animation.There are these giant piranha plant things early on in the game that demand a pixel perfect leap over them, but with these hitboxes, sometimes pixel perfect isn't even good enough. This wouldn't be a big issue, if it wasn't for the next problem I have with the hack, The bosses.

The bosses in this game are pretty badly designed, leaving you very little openings to hit them. Paired with the bugged hit boxes, you have to be lucky, and abuse save states to beat a lot of these bosses.

Lastly, the credits sequence is bugged, you can't read any of the names as they're all off to the side, and at the end, you just hear the death jingle and you go back to the map. Not sure if that's intended or not.

When I wasn't struggling with bosses or the terrible piranha plant enemies, I was actually having a wonderful time with this game. I see that this is intended to be the final version of the game, but I really hope Ice Man considers doing something about the bosses and the hitbox problem because the rest of the game is golden.

I recommend you play this one but not without a little save scumming ( I was fortunate enough to have the SNES Classic edition's rewind feature to aid me, though personally I hate being forced to save scum )