10 things I learned while playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder

4. The Bubble and Drill power-ups are really fun

While a lot of the focus on power-ups seems to be on the Elephant Fruit, I honestly think the Bubble Flower and the Drill Mushroom were way more interesting.

The Drill Mushroom gives your character a really cool black and red outfit (Peach and Daisy end up looking super goth and I love it) as well as a drill on their head that gave me Puppet Master vibes. Not only does this drill protect you from anything that might be coming down on you, it also gives you new forms of traversal. Digging into the ground or burrowing into cave ceilings allow players to actually find new areas they might not normally be able to get into.

Meanwhile, the Bubble Flower makes your character bubble gum pink and allows you to spit bubbles. I’m not playing when I say that these are straight-up bubbles from Bubble Bobble. You can spit out a ton of them in front of you and any enemy caught in a bubble will be trapped in it and float away. But if you’re careful, you can also bounce off of these bubbles allowing you to create makeshift platforms to areas out of reach.

I love how many traversal options these power-ups allow as there are multiple ways to get through most stages depending on what kind of power-ups you got handy. They all seemed to have areas only accessible by certain power-ups which makes the replayability huge.

3. Power-Ups are plentiful

Another cool thing that I found in multiplayer is that if you hit a block and a power-up comes out, as many come out as there are players. For example, we hit a block that held the Elephant Fruit. Four Elephant Fruit shot out the top and scattered about allowing all four of us to capture it.

In the frequent case where someone grabbed two, they were able to use the aforementioned Prince Florian ability to recall an extra time.