lolwut

I know that it's been a while since release but I feel like I should give my impressions of this hack after playing through the majority of it (currently, I'm on World 7).
First of all, the visuals of this game look great. This also applies to the music and world maps, by the way. Seriously, I wouldn't have been surprised if Nintendo made some of these new tilesets. There were just a few things that I thought looked odd (one in particular being the ice tiles from the level based on Cool Cool Mountain).
However, the gameplay, (I'm really trying to be polite here) is... subpar. First of all ,the Clone. I thought it was a cool idea at first, but after playing through a level with it, I have to say that it is an incredibly frustrating concept, and I found myself constantly hoping that the next level wouldn't use it. Quite frankly, I really, really don't think that it should have been in this game because of much harder it makes everything. Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I've died because the clone ran into something offscreen. My main strategy was to get to the midway point, kill myself, and then go back to get the star coins. However the levels without the clone are... not that much better. My main problem with them is twofold. First of all, the vast majority of levels in this game are far too short. Really, a few of the levels don't even feel like they're half as long as those in the original game. The second problem was that the levels felt far too random. With few exceptions, the levels in NSMB generally focused around one gimmick or idea, such as an object theme, or enemy. Here, it feels like the designer wasn't sure what to do and was rushing, so he threw a bunch of different things together.
The bosses were good, for the most part; I liked the fact that you didn't just reuse existing ones.
In conclusion, I'd to have to give this game a 5/10 because of the meh level design. I have yet to play NSMA, but from looking at the trailer, the levels look much better than they do here, and I look forward to playing it, and Endless Earth.