Will Island is a compilation episode of SMBX featuring all of the developer’s stages from numerous other collabs. It almost feels more appropriate to review it on a level-by-level basis, but I think there’s enough I can say about it generally that it won’t be necessary. After all, I give my thoughts on the individual levels in my LP of it already.

Let’s Talk About Graphics!

These are all over the place, though that’s natural for a project of this kind. Almost every stage has its own unique look, so you’ll rarely see the same setting twice. Since a lot of Willhart’s work was included in Talkhaus games, the majority of them use the SMBX sprite pack with Demo and the rest of their strange lot, though that won’t mean much if you’re unfamiliar with that community.

While there are plenty of unique visuals, some are put to better use than others. At times, the game can be quite artful, and at others, a bit weird. The main issue is that the graphics aren’t always suited to 2D platforming, so it can be tough to construe the important parts of a stage at a glance. The other issue is that the stages constantly changing visual styles makes the game feel like a hodgepodge. It’s not a cohesive project, but it was never meant to be one, so you kind of have to take each stage at face value on its own. There are also a lot of times where it’s hard to be sure what you’re dealing with, but that’s more of a gameplay concern and something I’ll touch on later.

Overall, it has a wide range of styles and types of graphics borrowed from numerous sources. It may not be consistent, but at least it’s interesting to look at.

Let’s Talk About Audio!

Apart from SMBX’s usual fare, a large number of different songs are used for the various stages. There were some I recognized and others I didn’t, but none of them stood out to me as being inappropriate. Basically, the music choices fit, but they aren’t mind-blowing either.

Let’s Talk About Story!

There is none. What were you expecting? I guess it’s kind of the story of Willhart’s SMBX career, but it’s nonlinear since the levels are not in the order of their creation. They are loosely arranged around a difficulty curve, and each world gets generally harder, but there’s no unifying motivation for you to reach them except to see what you can see. How liberating.

Let’s Talk About Gameplay!

You might expect this would require the least explanation since it’s just SMBX, but this game does a considerable amount of gameplay innovation. It sticks to the SMBX engine at its core, but levels often have their own gimmicks that bend or break the rules, and this can be a double-edged sword.

As I mentioned earlier, each stage feels like its own thing, and what that amounts to is having to figure out what’s different every time you enter a new one. It’s not as though all of them are so diverse, but enough of them are mechanically different that it’s going to happen repeatedly. Even if the basic platforming is still the same, you may need to learn the behaviors of unfamiliar obstacles or NPCs, and even if you recognize the NPC they were based on, they might still have surprises up their sleeves.

See, Willhart is a clever enough dev that he can look under the hood of SMBX and change things on an internal level. Some parts are still hard-coded as they ever were, but he can do things like change the behaviors of NPCs or add new functions to your inputs; stuff that isn’t supported in SMBX normally, but is still within the realm of possibility, even without the use of Lua. Once again, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it opens up new options for innovation. On the other, it makes things more confusing as there’s no limit to what the player may need to learn or relearn to deal with the changes.

This largely comes down to how the changes are presented and how much guesswork is involved in understanding them. It varies by case, and I found it to be somewhat exhausting. For as much SMBX as I’ve played, there was plenty to trip me up, and I can’t help but wonder if I would’ve had a better experience being less familiar with the engine and its functions. Either way, there’s no shortage of variety, it just becomes a bit much after a while. Some of these gimmicks feel like entire games could be shaped around them, so having them come and go in short succession makes for a taxing experience.

Let’s Wrap This Up…

This game, as a whole, is not that great, but it’s not something you should take as a whole. The more you view the levels as isolated, the better of a time you’ll have with it. There are so many styles of stage, including visuals, gimmicks, and mechanics, that it’s just full of surprises. It’s not a cohesive experience by any stretch, but I think it’s a worthwhile one, if only to see what Willhart is capable of. Unfortunately, it all varies so drastically that a middling rating is the most I can give it. Thus, it gets a…

2.5/5


You can reach for the stars, but they’re basically gigantic fireballs so like ouch man.