Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World (3DS) Review

Seeing handheld games being ported to consoles isn’t surprising, but the 3DS has been quite weird in getting Wii U ports. Hyrule Warriors, Super Mario Maker & now Yoshi’s Woolly World has arrived on the Nintendo 3DS as Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World.

Like most remakes and ports, Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World has a few new tricks up its sleeve, albeit not many.  First & biggest addition is in the title, Poochy gets his own adorable amiibo to join with the other 4 adorable Yarn Yoshi. Not only can you scan in Poochy during a level to help seek out secrets, grab collectibles and even ride on him across otherwise deadly terrain, but he get’s six of his very own levels in Poochy Dash.

Poochy Dash is a set of six autorunning levels (one unlocked per world) where you control Poochy to gather up his three Poochy Pups and collecting a load of beads while doing so. Once you complete one of these levels, you will unlock three challenges to complete. While there’s only the six levels, if you have the Poochy amiibo, you can unlock a Time Trial version. We weren’t able to get our hands on the amiibo before release, so I can’t tell you anything about that unfortunately. Also of note, if you pass through the goal ring collecting a Flower, you can play a level of Poochy Dash with a golden Lakitu spewing beads at you and showing you the path to take to save all three pups.

Added amiibo support was included with new yarn designs for characters like Ryu, Wolf Link, Isabelle and most importantly, Waluigi. All previously supported amiibo will work here too. If you don’t like the unlockable designs, or amiibo designs well you can create your own. There’s two modes to customise your own Yoshi – Basic & Professional. The Basic mode allows you to draw a design and have it automatically be placed all over Yoshi, while Proffessional lets you individually customise each section of them. Unlike Animal Crossing, you can’t save these as QR codes but they can be transferred via Streetpass.

So what about the game itself? Well it’s brilliant. Haven’t you played it? You should. Apart from some lower quality textures, zoomed in camera and lacking 2 player co-op, the game plays identically. That’s the thing about Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World, it feels like it belongs on the 3DS (and especially New 3DS at double the framerate) and that’s the biggest compliment you can give any port. You can check out a comparison video below, but on screen (and even in 3D) this  game looks stunning. You can check out our original review of the Wii U version here.

While Super Mario Maker 3DS felt crippled and downgraded, Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World feels equal. With the Wii U version getting updated to support Poochy & Poochy Dash there’s not too many advantages to the game, but also no downsides. If you missed this on Wii U, there’s no excuses not to pick this up, but if you do own it already you may just want to look into adding the amiibo to your collection. Now if only we had some Poochy Pup amiibo….

Rating: 4/5