Alongside the announcement, Nintendo also released a lengthy overview trailer demonstrating how the game works — including its microtransactions.
Dr. Mario World is a Match-3 puzzle game, tasking players with matching different pill colors to different viruses to clear stages. Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Each stage has its share of obstacles, be they have traps to work around or blocks impeding progress. The stages are spread out over five themed worlds (hence “world” in the title) based on the usual Mario themes: sky, ice, haunted, and so on. Nintendo will be adding more worlds eventually, too.
The game initially gives access to Dr. Mario himself, but as players collect coins and diamonds — the game’s primary collectible items — they can eventually unlock other doctors, including Peach, Yoshi, and even Bowser. Each doctor has their own special skill, like randomly clearing obstacles or rows.
The catch here is a stamina-like system, similar to Fire Emblem Heroes, but much more limiting. Players must spend hearts to attempt a stage, and while they refill one every 30 minutes, the little “+” icon next to the heart shows, unsurprisingly, hearts can be purchased using diamonds as well.
It appears the player can only hold five hearts at once, which means either tackling one or two stages per day or buying diamonds to buy more hearts. There’s an infinite option that lets players attempt as many stages as they want in 60 minutes, too — for a price. A full five-heart refill would cost 10 diamonds, which translates to $1.99 (for 20 diamonds), while the hour-long unlimited option goes for 30 diamonds.
Diamonds are also used to obtain additional capsules players can use to continue a stage should they run out of capsules before finishing. As one would expect, these, too, are available for purchase in the in-game store and can be used to obtain more hearts.
There’s a feature where friends can share hearts with each other as well, though the trailer doesn’t provide any more information than that.
