Game reception and rating: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Super Mario Galaxy 2 received universal acclaim from major video game critics with numerous reviews praising the game for its creativity and technical improvements over the original. It has an average critic score of 97.12% at GameRankings and 97/100 at Metacritic, making it one of the highest rated games on the sites.[35][36]

Tom McShea from GameSpot called it a "new standard for platformers", giving it a perfect 10, making it the seventh game in the site's history to earn that score.[41] Other perfect scores came from Edge, stating "this isn't a game that redefines the genre: this is one that rolls it up and locks it away",[38] and IGN's Craig Harris, who felt that the game "perfectly captures that classic videogame charm, the reason why most of us got into gaming from the start".[43] IGN later placed Super Mario Galaxy 2 4th on their "Top Modern Games" list.[47] The Escapist editor Susan Arendt echoed this view by stating it "doesn't tinker with the established formula very much, but we didn't really want it to",[48] while GameTrailers commented that "there's something tremendous for just about everyone and games that we can truly recommend to almost everyone are rare".[7]

Giant Bomb's Ryan Davis particularly praised the improved level designs, commenting that the designers were "bolder" and "more willing to take some weird risks with the planetoids and abstract platforming that set the tone in the original Galaxy",[49] while Chris Kohler from Wired commented that the level concepts alone "could be made into full games on their own".[50] Additionally 1UP.com's Justin Haywald noted the expanded soundtrack as "sweeping".[37] GamesRadar praised the graphics, saying that despite the Wii's technical limitations, Galaxy 2 "understands how to get the most out of aging technology that nearly all graphical flaws are smoothed over or covered up, leaving you with Wii's best-looking title to date".[35] X-Play editor Andrew Pfister awarded Super Mario Galaxy 2 a 5/5, calling it "the culmination of 20 years of Mario gaming into one fantastically-designed and creative platformer".[51]

Despite this praise, some critics raised complaints over increased difficulty and the game's similarity to the original Super Mario Galaxy. Chris Scullion from Official Nintendo Magazine called it the "new best game on Wii", but said it lacked the original's impact (though they admitted the extreme difficulty of this, due to the quality of the original).[44] Game Informer editor Matt Helgeson was concerned with some of the challenges being potentially "frustrating",[52] particularly towards the end of the game;[53] similarly, Ben PeeLee from GamePro remarked that the "increased difficulty and high proficiency requirement may turn new fans off".[40] However, Worthplaying editor Chris DeAngelus said "perhaps most positively of all, there are very few sequences where death will feel like a result of bad design instead of player error, which helps keep the frustration down".[54]