Over the weekend I got 52 stars, reached the ToyTime galaxy and enjoyed every single second of the time I spent playing. Everything seems to have been tweaked and tested until it was perfect. All games should be like this, but very, very few are.

The graphics are great, the sound (both effects and music) are utterly exceptional. The controls take five minutes to get used to, but are then never a problem. The whole game is just so imaginative and polished it makes other games look, well, broken.

The difficulty level is perfect for me. I’ve seen the Game Over screen twice, I think, and I’ve lost a lot of lives, but nothing has frustrated me, nothing’s seemed impossible or based on luck. Even the bosses are great fun, being quite easy to kill once you’ve worked out how. A mole boss gave me a fair bit of trouble, but by the time I killed him I’d worked him out so managed to go back and get an extra star for killing him without being hit.

Of particular note is the co-op gameplay. It sounds rubbish but is, in fact, genius. And I think I really mean that. I can’t imagine who would have thought it up, but it works. My wife would probably have trouble with the main game, but this way she can play alongside me and enjoy the game. We work well as a team and the special high jump you can do by both pressing A at the same time has come in surprisingly useful at times.

I think that it’s fair to say that this is actually a better game than Mario 64. It’s taken a long, long time, but we’ve finally got it.