Kirby Star Allies Demo Impressions

I haven’t always been a Kirby fan. In fact, I didn’t know much about the big pink fur ball until the Wii Virtual Console. I saw the NES Kirby game for download there and thought, “Why not?” and downloaded it. And with that, I was a Kirby fan for life! That said, I have always liked the more traditional Kirby eats everything games more than the other more gimmicky games (though Kirby Robobot was pretty cool). So Kirby Star Allies for the Nintendo Switch had my attention right away! Thanks to the magic of the Switch being region-free, I got to play the demo of the new Kirby game. What did I think of it? Read on to find out.

Kirby Star Allies is a much more traditional Kirby game then recent games in the series and there has been a lot of people blasting the game because of that. It seems that people wanted a gimmick like a giant robot or something for this game too. Don’t get me wrong: giant robots are cool. Though, I love traditional Kirby. And hey, its not like Star Allies isn’t completely without a gimmick.

This time, Kirby has friends. He can make friends out of some enemies and they’ll follow him around. You can also have some friends take control of the enemies! Either way, this new gimmick is pretty cool. Kirby does still have his eat everything in sight gameplay mechanic too!

Kirby can eat enemies (and friends! What?!) to get powers. Thats very typical Kirby. The friending ability  is something new though. It works on all of the enemies with powers (not bosses of course). If you have friends to play with then it’ll be extra fun. Though, if you don’t have friends, you shouldn’t worry about your computer controlled allies.

The computer controlled allies in this game are really smart. They will know when its their turn to complete a puzzle! For example, in the demo there was some barrels of TNT. A fuse was nearby but there was also water nearby to get in the way of this puzzle. So I got out a big umbrella, stopped the water from running to the fuse and one of my allies, a fire guy, lit the fuse! BOOM! Thats team work!

Kirby Star Allies is a platformer, with puzzles, and lots of fighting. The first boss battle I fought, against a familar tree, was pretty easy. The second boss fight was a bit harder. The demo for this game wasn’t too hard but I did die a couple of times. I suspect expert platformer fans won’t die at all. This demo was really fun though.

The graphics on Kirby Star Allies are excellent too. The colors are so bright and cheerful. This is the first Kirby game for the Switch and it looks like a really good one.

Stay tuned to GamesReviews.com for more Kirby Star Allies goodness. Our Editor-in-chief Adam Roffel will have coverage of the full Kirby Star Allies game: previews & a review!