Review by: Brandon "Brawl Ball" Cackowski-Schnell

Over the past few years, Kirby has become the go-to character for Nintendo to use when trying out game ideas and concepts that don’t fit well with other Nintendo properties. Canvas Curse and Kirby’s Epic Yarn both feature the little pink blob but not in the enemy-consuming, power stealing form we’re used to. Nintendo has added Kirby Mass Attack to the list of Kirby games that aren’t traditional Kirby games and the result is the same mix of cuteness, creativity and varying degrees of difficulty that the Kirby franchise has come to represent.

Kirby is doing his usual, whatever it is that Kirby does, when the evil wizard Necrodius shows up to ruin the fun by splitting Kirby up into ten little min-Kirbys. At first you have just one Kirby to control with the stylus: tapping to make Kirby dash to the tapped spot, holding down the stylus and drawing a line to make Kirby follow a certain path and flicking the stylus to fling Kirby up to ledges and into breakable blocks. As you traverse the level, you find fruit to consume, some of it lying around, some of it obtained by directing the Kirbys to pummel enemies into fruit producing submission. Eat a hundred bits of fruit and another Kirby will be summoned from, I don’t know, the Kirby personality purgatory, until you have an even set of ten Kirbys awaiting your bidding.

Increasing your mob of ravenous Kirbys has numerous benefits beyond simply extending the number of Kirbys available to survive. For one, the more Kirbys you have beating on an enemy, the faster it will go down. Second, the more Kirbys you have, the more air you can hold in your little pink lungs when Kirby has to traverse the various underwater sections. When your Kirbys eventually get hit, one hit turning them blue while a second turns them into adorable, little Kirby angels, flinging a Kirby at them to grab them will wrestle their spirit down to the material plane where they return to corporeal form. The more Kirbys you have, the more spirit wrangling you can do while dealing with the threat at hand. Finally, if you’re planning on getting all of the medals in each level, having a full slate of Kirbys allows you to pull down giant plant roots, weigh down scales and generally traverse the environment in ways that lesser number of pink puffballs won’t allow.

Of course, there are Kirby requirements to simply progress in the path to the personality reunion and if you don’t have enough Kirbys, you won’t be able to make it to the inner parts of the current world. Luckily you can replay earlier worlds to munch enough fruit and bring your number of Kirbys up to the required number. If you already have enough Kirbys, eating fruit gives bonuses to your score as well as a general feeling of nutritional satisfaction.

Plan on revisiting those earlier worlds often as this game can get downright difficult pretty quickly and all of the Kirby flinging in the world won’t prevent wayward souls from making it to that Great Pink House in the sky. Controlling all of your Kirbys to keep them from getting killed in the environment, deal with the enemy threats and prevent Kirbys from floating to the great beyond requires some serious stylus skills, and that’s not considering what you have to do to obtain all of the medals. Still, it never feels cheap, just challenging. Sometimes, getting medals is a matter of seeing that you choose the wrong path and making a note to pick a different one later. Others is a case of realizing that you don’t have the right number of Kirbys for the job, which makes going back and getting them pretty easy. They’re not all quite so easy though, or even remotely easy but this isn’t pee-wee soccer son. You need to earn those medals.