(EDITED to remove some potential problem solving spoilers)

So yeah, I wasn't really aware SMBX was a thing until long after I knew about Mario Maker. I happened to run into this SMBX thing in some Youtube videos one day, and later I discovered that my long time forum mate and author of Carlsev Saga, Deckiller, happened to have made a short adventure with it.

Super Mario Brothers X is a pretty neat tool, but it has a few issues of its own that I will go through later in the comments, if anyone wishes to know. Any flaws in SMBX are not Deckiller's fault, but SMBX's. Anyways, onward with the review.

I really like what was done here, a handful of pretty well made Mario levels, tied together through a simple storyline and a handful of secret stars.

The levels themselves are very well designed, some providing the good old linear Mario style most of us are used to, and others being more intrincate. Even in the simplest levels, there are always some little secret places to be found if you explore enough, and I love me some exploring. Exploring can yield things such as 1-ups, powerups, Yoshi coins, and the fabled red coins: gather five of them in a level and you can get a special star. Gather five of those special stars and you can do some... things that I'd rather not spoil, let's just say that you only get the "ultimate ending" if you get them all.

The levels in this game are much more puzzle-intensive than the mostly simple, mostly linear official Mario games. You sometimes have to use fire, ice, koopa shells and other objects in all sorts of clever ways in order to move on (I won't spoil exactly where, after all, this is a review, not a walkthrough). Those situations do require some thought, but they are luckily never too hard to execute or figure out. I particularly like how some key-and-keyhole mechanics were used in levels such as Desert Ruins, Snowy Secrets and Bowser's base, where you have to hit switch blocks in order to unlock new sections of the levels which you then need to remember and return to. That adds a nice layer of problem solving to the game, and I like that a lot.

Now, while all of the above is great and made me enjoy the game a lot, this game suffers from a severe difficulty spike problem. Right from the get go, and all the way through the experience, you'll encounter occasional situations where you're faced with hard to reach jumps, enemies and spikes placed just at the right spots to get you and some narrow slippery ice platforms that make you fall to your doom. Those are extremely frustrating, and made a few of my deaths feel rather cheap. It doesn't help that there are no checkpoints inside stages, and that you have to re-obtain any red stars you got in case of death.

The biggest offender in what concerns difficulty, in my experience, was Hammer Panic Redux. The platforms where the Hammer Bros stand are way too narrow and hard to hit, and I saw myself losing many of my lives, until I finally decided to backtrack to level 1 so I got a fireflower to face the baddies. Actually, when you come to think of it, being able to backtrack to a previous level because you know there's something useful in it adds a nice layer of depth and enjoyment to the overall gaming experience, even when you only thought of doing that after failing a thousand times, so yeah, I guess Hammer Panic Redux is both good and bad in that sense.

So, overall, great Mario adventure, nice level design, containing some pretty neat puzzle and problem solving challenges, but there are some difficulty spikes and cheap deaths that made this slightly less great than it had all the right to be. Great work!