Kirby Mass Attack
Jan. 11th, 2012 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe evil skull-monster Necrodeus catches Kirby off guard and splits him into ten mini-Kirbies, each with only a fraction of his usual power. Fortunately, 1/10th of a hardcore badass pink puffball is still sufficient to gather up the rest of them and fight back against the skull gang.
The controls are stylus-only, making the game kind of a sequel to Kirby: The Canvas Curse. It’s somewhere between an action-puzzle game and a platformer, and it pretty much works. And it’s easier to control than you might think. It’s the first platformer where I’ve been okay with stylus controls, certainly. Wario: Master of Disguise tried something similar, but I really couldn’t deal with the control scheme for that. (Really, action games shouldn’t have stylus controls. You want a stylus for puzzles, adventure games and tactical rpgs—anything where you’d want a mouse. Other rpgs don’t need them, and they just make most action games more difficult.)
You start each area with a single Kirby, and collecting enough fruit gets you more, up to a total of ten. You don’t control them individually, instead you tap where you want them to go, press and hold them to carry the whole group, and flick them to make the body-slam things. Most fighting is done either by body-slamming or just dog piling on foes (which kills them faster the more kirbies are involved in it).
The Kirbies are occasionally incredibly stupid—their pathfinding is okay, and they have some amount of edge gravity, but they’ll gleefully suicide themselves against spikes if you don’t direct them not to. Fortunately, each Kirby can take two hits from most sources (the first turns them blue) and if you have other Kirbies remaining when one takes the second hit, they can pull the ghost down and turn it back into a blue Kirby.
If you die, your score is reset to zero and you’re booted back to the beginning of the stage with however many Kirbies you started with. It’s occasionally better to die and start again with lots of Kirbies and just redo the stage from scratch, then to just barely make it through with very few Kirbies which you need to replace before continuing. Especially since most stages have a minimum number of Kirbies you need in order to enter.
Each level has 3 or 5 medals to collect, and one of them is a “rainbow” medal. Collecting the medals unlocks minigames and eventually the “checklists”, which tell you what the requirements are to get the achievements. (There’s an achievement list similar to trophies on most consoles.) You need to collect all of the rainbow medals to access the fifth and final area and finish the game.
The gimmick is lot of puzzles, generally figuring out how to get around obstacles with all of your Kirbies intact. There are underwater stages, dark stages, wind puzzles, bouncy puzzles, auto-scrolling areas, etc. I think level 4-3 is my favorite: Your Kirbies all jump into a tank and you then auto-scroll through the level, shooting Kirbies at things to blow them up. (The Kirbies climb back into the tank after a short delay. They’re hardcore like that.)
They’re pretty creative with variations of the concept. The “theme park” areas in world 3 are particularly amusing in this regard, including a surfing level and a picture-matching section. Though I will say that some of the levels are annoyingly long, particularly the last few in area 4. They become marathon sessions to try to complete with all the secrets.
There’s a theory on TVTropes that Kirby is actually a baby eldritch abomination, and the games are a candy-coated depiction of his reign of terror upon dreamland. I think there’s something to this: He devours his enemies whole and absorbs their strength! He’s an unstoppable force that returns every time you kill him! He can be cut up into 10 pieces, yet each functions as an autonomous whole! Ia! Ia!
Overall: This is a cute puzzle-platformer that falls somewhere between a typical Kirby game and Lemmings. It’s different, it’s fun, and if you like those sorts of things, it’s worth a go.
The controls are stylus-only, making the game kind of a sequel to Kirby: The Canvas Curse. It’s somewhere between an action-puzzle game and a platformer, and it pretty much works. And it’s easier to control than you might think. It’s the first platformer where I’ve been okay with stylus controls, certainly. Wario: Master of Disguise tried something similar, but I really couldn’t deal with the control scheme for that. (Really, action games shouldn’t have stylus controls. You want a stylus for puzzles, adventure games and tactical rpgs—anything where you’d want a mouse. Other rpgs don’t need them, and they just make most action games more difficult.)
You start each area with a single Kirby, and collecting enough fruit gets you more, up to a total of ten. You don’t control them individually, instead you tap where you want them to go, press and hold them to carry the whole group, and flick them to make the body-slam things. Most fighting is done either by body-slamming or just dog piling on foes (which kills them faster the more kirbies are involved in it).
The Kirbies are occasionally incredibly stupid—their pathfinding is okay, and they have some amount of edge gravity, but they’ll gleefully suicide themselves against spikes if you don’t direct them not to. Fortunately, each Kirby can take two hits from most sources (the first turns them blue) and if you have other Kirbies remaining when one takes the second hit, they can pull the ghost down and turn it back into a blue Kirby.
If you die, your score is reset to zero and you’re booted back to the beginning of the stage with however many Kirbies you started with. It’s occasionally better to die and start again with lots of Kirbies and just redo the stage from scratch, then to just barely make it through with very few Kirbies which you need to replace before continuing. Especially since most stages have a minimum number of Kirbies you need in order to enter.
Each level has 3 or 5 medals to collect, and one of them is a “rainbow” medal. Collecting the medals unlocks minigames and eventually the “checklists”, which tell you what the requirements are to get the achievements. (There’s an achievement list similar to trophies on most consoles.) You need to collect all of the rainbow medals to access the fifth and final area and finish the game.
The gimmick is lot of puzzles, generally figuring out how to get around obstacles with all of your Kirbies intact. There are underwater stages, dark stages, wind puzzles, bouncy puzzles, auto-scrolling areas, etc. I think level 4-3 is my favorite: Your Kirbies all jump into a tank and you then auto-scroll through the level, shooting Kirbies at things to blow them up. (The Kirbies climb back into the tank after a short delay. They’re hardcore like that.)
They’re pretty creative with variations of the concept. The “theme park” areas in world 3 are particularly amusing in this regard, including a surfing level and a picture-matching section. Though I will say that some of the levels are annoyingly long, particularly the last few in area 4. They become marathon sessions to try to complete with all the secrets.
There’s a theory on TVTropes that Kirby is actually a baby eldritch abomination, and the games are a candy-coated depiction of his reign of terror upon dreamland. I think there’s something to this: He devours his enemies whole and absorbs their strength! He’s an unstoppable force that returns every time you kill him! He can be cut up into 10 pieces, yet each functions as an autonomous whole! Ia! Ia!
Overall: This is a cute puzzle-platformer that falls somewhere between a typical Kirby game and Lemmings. It’s different, it’s fun, and if you like those sorts of things, it’s worth a go.
