It's playable, but not very fun.

So here we go with yet another Mario fangame, this time by Ludwig X. He's come up with the completely and totally original idea of continuing the main Mario franchise, by gracing our PCs with Super Mario Bros. 5. Forget the non-existant Super Mario Bros. 4, let's just skip ahead to 5.

Now, let's move on to the review itself.

GRAPHICS: 2/5
The graphics, while nice, are all over the place. We have a mix of resized, horribly pixellated, custom and ripped sprites in this game, all put together with the totally underused Black Squirrel tileset(at least it's the 2006 version and not 2007...).

Let's see...A recolored Mario? SMW2 AND SMB2 Shy Guys? M&L Enemies? It's all mashed together with no consistency at all. It almost looks like Ludwig X just put sprites that would look cool in the game and not making sure he kept style mixing to a minimum.

Graphics get a 2.

SOUND: 2/5
The music is not so hot, either. Many of these songs, to me, have been used to death. There's only one song I was surprised to hear in this game, and it was in the first ice level. It was refreshing for me to hear something non-Mario on a Mario fangame that isn't mine, but too bad that's probably the only song that isn't non-Mario.

Sounds do their job except one: the spring sound. That's not even the spring sound effect I heard before! For some reason Ludwig X used the SMB2 vegetable pickup sound for the springs instead of the usual bouncing sound. It's just a minor nitpick of mine, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't bother other casual fangamers.

GAMEPLAY: 2/5
All right. Time to get down to the meat of this review: the gameplay itself.

The gameplay is your basic "Mario fangame with no inertia or variable jumping" fare, so I don't really need to get too in-depth with the engine itself.

The game itself...plays okay, but there are some things that annoyed me quite a bit, mainly the powerups. We have the astounding total of three powerups: the fire flower, the ice flower and the hammer. The fire flower works like any other Mario fangame that has it should, but this one behaves a little differently. Instead of the usual two fireball limit, we have four. And not to mention they're so slow that even Mario can outrun them when he's dashing! Shooting fireballs in the air is also a pain, because the game seems to choose when I can shoot them or not. I mentioned this before when this was still being worked on, and I'm disappointed that it hasn't been dealt with. The hammer is also a disappointment. It's not the hammer suit, mind you, but it's a weapon Mario throws at enemies. With the mouse. You have a limited quantity of them but the game never tells you when you're going to run out. Again, I mentioned this before the game was finished. Also throwing hammers is a pain, because you now have to use the mouse to shoot AND use the keyboard to maneuver Mario. If you're about to get killed by an enemy and you're not quick enough, you're plumb out of luck.

Now let's get into the level design. While I never made it far past the second castle, the levels before it left me unimpressed. Leaps of faith exist in some levels with no indication where a safe platform is, a bunch one-block wide platforms, annoying enemy placement and no checkpoints make this game a chore to play through. Why do people think that having one-block wide platforms is CHALLENGING and EDGY?! It's just tedious to get past, it's not challenging at all and one screw up sends you to the start seeing as there's no checkpoints. Checkpoints would have made this game much more manageable than it is at the time this review was written.

Oh, and on a minor note, Ludwig X forgot to turn off GM's default saving feature. You know, the one where you press F5 to quick-save and F6 to quick-load? Unless that was intentionally left there, it seems that this is the closest we can get to checkpoints for this game.

STORY: 1/5
Peach has been kidnapped and Mario has to save her. Been used countless times, so you're better off just thinking the story is non-existant. There aren't even cutscenes narrating the plot so far, not even with GM's message boxes.

OVERALL: 2/5
To be honest, I didn't really find much to praise about this game. It's not as glitchy as before, that's a plus, but other than that it's just another Mario fangame that's getting countless fours and fives without many good statements backing them up, which seems to be an undying trend here on YoYo Games.

And in my opinion I don't think it should be associating itself with the main Mario series as it is right now. Where are the ? blocks, for example? Ludwig X is better off titling it to something else because this game pales in comparison to the other three.