Hey! Pikmin - This Time the Colorful Vegetables Are Invading the 3DS [Game Review]

conexus (58)in #gaming • 7 years ago (edited)

Nintendo 3DS is still very much alive and its especially clear when the Japanese gaming giant keeps pumping out games to their darling portable console. Before this year will end we will see many good-looking titles like Metroid: Samus Returns, Pokémon Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon and Kirby 25th Anniversary. Its pretty clear that their portable console still plays a crucial part in their future, even though the Switch is highly relevant in this current time.

As I have spent a couple of hundred hours in the past with the colorful vegetables Pikmins for both the Gamecube and Wii U, Iwas very happy when Hey! Pikmin was announced. It feels particularly fun because I have felt that an portable game starring Pikmin would fit very well, but still I have of course been skeptical, especially by the fact that its not a pure sequel were talking about, but rather a free-standing spinoff.

The colorful universe of Pikmin is a super cozy one.

In Hey! Pikmin you once again take the part of the funky captain Olimar that, as in usual order, has been forced to crash land on a foreign plant. This time you don't have to hunt for ship parts or something like that, but instead you need to find 30 000 Sparklium to be able to fix your ship. It might sound like an eternity project but the truth is that the Sparklium's come in great abundance across the worlds. The Pikmin-series has always been an juicy mix of realtime- strategy and puzzle aspects, but the Nintendo 3DS-adventure also adds some action-sequences where you have to use every little Pikmin in your disposal.

In contrary to the earlier Pikmin-games you can this time only control a maximum of 20 Pikmins at any one time and to discover many of the hidden treasures in a world you must, more often than not, have every single one with you until the end. These Pikmins vary in both skills and appearance. A red Pikmin can walk trough fire, a yellow Pikmin likes electricity and can be thrown really high and a blue Pikmin can swim in water while the black sumo-Pikmin can crush ice-blocks. The path towards your goal is riddled with many different puzzles, where you have to use every Pikmin in your team to progress. And on top of all of that, there is also many hostile creatures with the only goal of trying to make every puzzle feel like hell.

The first portable Pikmin adventure is surprisingly good and offers many secrets.

It doesn't take many minutes before I realize just exactly how entertaining and addictive this game really is. You navigate with Olimar usin the cross-air and the game makes good use of the touch-screen. The stylus-pen will be used many times during the adventure and it works very well in fights and puzzles. Your Pikmins is an absolute must for survival and these are ordered by using the pen. You can use them, among many other things, to fling like living projectiles against your enemies or just fling them upwards to gain access to tricky locations in order to solve puzzles.

The problem with stylus focused games is that the control-scheme can get tiresome after a while but Nintendo should get props for how well developed the controls have been in Pikmin, and i never got tired from controlling Olimar or ordering my Pikmins. No matter if it's about basic controlling or activating Olimars jetpack you need to use the touch-screen - thank god it works smoothly and feels comfortable.

The game becomes incredible suffering because of the mild difficulty

Sadly Nintendo has the ability to release games that are more fit for the younger gamers then for us who are a bit more of veteran-gamers. And this is clearly evident in Hey! Pikmin. The whole adventure is frustratingly easy and during my playtrough I got to experience the Game Over-screen exactly zero times, which is a weak sign considering I'm not the best player in the world. The challenge is in keeping all your Pikmins alive to solve all of the worlds end puzzles to get those special treasures. And its just the treasure hunting that's the most entertaining aspect of the game, and it also makes Hey! Pikmin very addictive. The Pikmin-series is commonly known to offer many cozy references to other Nintendo-games and among the treasures I found an Game Boy Advance-unit, a Legend of Zelda-cassette and a Super Mario Bros-cassette. Its also nice to check out the gallery to get more details on the treasures you find, and I personally loved the extra treasures of the game - they are very fun,clever and creative in their design.

Unfortunately, the game's bosses is one of the games biggest minus points, and they're never very satisfactory to meet.

Even if the game is far to easy its still varying enough to keep me entertained all the way to the end. Even though the adventure is quite long to be 2D handheld-platformer, I was also surprised in how diverse the different worlds and levels were. Hey! Pikmin offers many surprises and all of the games worlds are unique in their own little way, and the 4 levels that exist in every world offer very different objectives with everything from diving in sewers to taking calm strolls trough forests. The boss fights doesn't impress though, and they are not very innovative or exciting to encounter, they are very easy to defeat as well.

After finishing every level you get to visit something that's called Pikmin Park and its a place where all your Pikmins gather and where you can order them to different places in the park to scour the area for important resources. For example you can command your blue water-Pikmins to scour a small lake and after a while they will return with an reward. Pikmin Park is an much appreciated break from the games levels and I wish I could say the same of the bonus rooms. These are unlocked after finding a certain amount of treasures during a special level and under an limited time frame you must try and gather as much Sparklium as possible. Unfortunately the bonus levels are identical, but with that said I have not tried every bonus level as you can only get access to some with specially chosen Amiibo-figures.

If you help Olimar to find 30,000 Sparklium then you will finally get home

In the end I can not do anything else but recommend Hey! Pikmin and even if the game has it flaws one should not forget that its also charming, relaxing and very entertaining in its moments, and what more do you really need from an handheld game? If anything, the portable version has made me really look forward to what Nintendo has in store for the coming Switch-version.