Skip to main content

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker review

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a delightfully simple and strange throwback from Nintendo

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker screenshot 14
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
“After 30 years, Toad has a game that reflects him perfectly: just the right season and proudly of a different time.”
Pros
  • Gorgeous presentation.
  • Satisfying, replayable puzzle stages.
  • Uncluttered by needless extraneous features.
Cons
  • It's 2014, Nintendo. Extra lives are pointless.

Captain Toad belongs in a museum! So does his adventure pal Toadette, for that matter. That’s not to Indiana Jones shame the duo upon the release of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, their very first starring vehicle. As characters, Toad and Toadette are admirably simple. They walk briskly, pick things up, and that’s it. Their quest for golden riches is also limited in its goals: These two get around, but all they want to do is pick up coins, jewels, and gilded stars. Even by the standards of the countless throwback games made by small studios in recent years, Captain Toad is lovably anachronistic.

As characters, Toad and Toadette are admirably simple.

Captain Toad and Toadette are adventurers gathering up precious goods in odd little fantasy capsules. The stages in Treasure Tracker start out simple. Looking like bottle worlds freed from snow globes, each stage is a multi-tiered structure full of hidden nooks and crannies. Raised at the highest peak, hidden in an obscure tunnel, or waiting in the diorama’s nether region is a golden star. Examining the stage from multiple angles by spinning the camera, your goal is to move Toad to the star, and unraveling how to do that is lusciously vexing.

One example: an early stage in the game’s second act (out of three, plus a set of bonus stages) is a tiny swamp, covered with chomping vines and wandering trees with goofy faces, like a Sesame Street spin on Dagobah. Spin the camera around, and you can see the star sitting on a raised platform just beneath the surface. Toad can’t jump, but there isn’t an obvious hole to fall through to the star, so it’s off into the woods, dodging the patterned movements of the enemies to find switches that might change the landscape.

Even when you get the star, though, you haven’t totally conquered the stage. Hidden here, as in every stage, are three diamonds, plus a tertiary goal that’s always different. (In this example, you have to beat all the chompy vines.) Now, the whole stage requires re-examination and more careful analysis of what isn’t readily visible on the surface. Treasure Tracker never pummels you with difficult-to-untangle spaces. It’s always just complicated enough to make you think.

Replaying stages to get everything is part of Treasure Tracker‘s pleasure, but it doesn’t come at the expense of variety. The most impressive part of the game is how it almost never recycles ideas. One stage has you dodging carnivorous swamp weeds, but the next has you tapping the Wii U GamePad screen to move huge platforms. Another has you dodging heat-seeking bullets wearing ferocious grins, another riding a mine cart and shooting turnips and huge stacks of coins.

Even when it revisits an idea – all three acts have you facing down a googly-eyed dragon in a volcano – it always completely warps the challenge. The first time, you have to hide behind rocks to avoid fire, but the next you have to blow into the GamePad mic to raise little fan platforms. Some are easier than others, but they never feel lazy or ill-considered.

Replaying stages to get everything is part of Treasure Tracker’s pleasure, but it doesn’t come at the expense of variety.

Those GamePad controls and the lush high-def graphics are Treasure Tracker‘s only nods to modernity, enhancing its tactile similarity to Nintendo’s casual experiments on Super Nintendo or the Game Boy Advance. No Miiverse social features, no online multiplayer, and at this point no downloadable add-ons; Treasure Tracker‘s as self-contained as its stages. The focus is appreciated, though. Puzzling stages are what this game excels at, and nothing else clutters them… except for coins.

An otherwise successful anachronism, Treasure Tracker‘s only blemish is a throwback collectible that seems to be present for no other reason than Super Mario tradition. Toad and Toadette collect coins in every stage. When they collect 100 coins, they get an extra life. Enemies can kill Toad, and there are pools of lava and poison swamp water to fall in, but death isn’t a serious threat here so the extra lives stack up as you collect the literal piles of coins dotting the stages.

The little chime of a Mario coin or collecting the also ubiquitous green “1-Up” mushrooms is as infectious as always, but it feels like unnecessary clutter. If it’s easy to restart a stage in seconds, why have extra lives at all? If all the coins do is shine and go ding, why have them making so much unneeded audio/visual noise?

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker screenshot 7
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Treasure Tracker‘s old-fashioned style wouldn’t suffer from losing vestigial parts like coins, but it’s also not mortally wounded by their presence either. Even drowning in a sea of gold coins, Toad and Toadette are still winners, their shoebox-sized escapades softly impressive. Treasure Tracker is the perfect length. Gunning for 100-percent completion of everything should take the average player about 10 hours.

While less grand than Nintendo’s recent Wii U efforts like Super Mario 3D World, which this spins directly off of, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker feels like the type of effortlessly strange and fun game that Nintendo used to pump out monthly 20 years ago. Perfect for a museum then, but no less worthy of play time, Treasure Tracker is yet another feather in Wii U’s increasingly feathery cap.

This game was reviewed on a Wii U using a code provided by Nintendo.

Highs

  • Gorgeous presentation.
  • Satisfying, replayable puzzle stages.
  • Uncluttered by needless extraneous features.

Lows

  • It’s 2014, Nintendo. Extra lives are pointless.

Editors' Recommendations

Anthony John Agnello
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…
How to buy and customize ships in Sea of Thieves
The name King of Red Lions floats above a red, customized ship in Sea of Thieves.

The newest season of Sea of Thieves is here to take you back to your favorite swashbuckling adventure world. And whether that means you're checking out the series for the first time or you're having trouble remembering everything from the last time you played, you're probably aware that you'll need a ship to find a transport your booty around. Here's how to get a ship in Sea of Thieves as well as customize it to your liking.

Read more
Quick! This PS5 bundle just got an unprecedented price cut
The Playstation 5 system standing upright.

We didn't expect the PlayStation 5 Slim, the updated version of Sony's video game console, to go on sale this soon, but you can already get the PlayStation 5 Slim Marvel's Spider-Man 2 bundle from Amazon with a 20% discount. From its original price of $559, you'll only have to pay $449, which is a fantastic price for this gaming machine. PS5 deals always attract a lot of attention, so we expect this offer to get sold out quickly. If you want to take advantage of it, you're going to have to hurry in completing your purchase.

Why you should buy the PlayStation 5 Slim Marvel's Spider-Man 2 bundle
The PlayStation 5 Slim is more than just a slimmed-down version of the original PlayStation 5 -- though the difference is noticeable with 18% less weight and 30% less volume for the disc version. There's no performance upgrade between the PS5 Slim and PS5, and you'll be able to play all of the PlayStation 5 games on either model, but the PS5 Slim comes with a 1TB of storage with around 842GB usable, compared to 825GB with 667GB usable in the original PS5. That's nearly 200GB of extra space for your installed games, save data, and screenshots.

Read more
How to change your Steam username
Steam library.

Unless you've got an absolute premium username or have too many linked accounts to name, there's no reason to stick with the same username forever. Unlike some services that offer limited username changes or charge to change your tag, Steam allows users to adjust their usernames at any time.

You don't have to keep that awful username you picked on some random Tuesday before hopping into a game. Here's how you can make a change.

Read more