![]() In fact, even those of us who thought that the Wii U’s Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze erred on the side of too tough might feel that Triple Deluxe could be too much of a pushover. Triple Deluxe is not particularly challenging. Well, it’s all great so far, but at some point we have to talk about difficulty. Some levels push you to use it to suck double-decker buses, snowman heads or gargantuan turnips into position, while others just focus on cathartic, enemy-battering destruction. His all-hoovering mouth goes into hyperdrive, sending out a vortex that sucks in vast chunks of scenery, hulking enemies and even whole rollercoaster trains. Things only become more epic once our hero ingests a certain fruit. The sheer number and variety of these guises just adds to the variety of Triple Deluxe. It’s hard not to love the bell-bashing Kirby, whose clanging bell blows become more powerful as they keep on dinging up the scale. Suddenly, Kirby takes on something of their powers, becoming a sword-wielding, star-flinging ninja, a whip-cracking cowboy, a horn-headed beetle or a baseball-capped racer who becomes a speeding wheel. His real potential comes into play, though, once he sucks in certain enemies and you press down to ingest them. He can suck enemies in then puff them out, and – instead of a double jump – he can puff himself up and float further or higher in the air. ![]() No two sequential levels have the same look and feel. ![]() There are levels that make brilliant use of the 3DS’s tilt controls, and levels that fling you around at ridiculous speeds. Yet another might have you puzzling your way through by pulling dangerous electrocuting crates into position, or lugging timebombs around to destroy stacks of blocks. Another has you flipping between cascades of water, dodging chubby fish and hungry eels. One level might have you checking reflections in a background mirror so that you can see what’s happening in obscured areas of the foreground. or Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World, but like those games Triple Deluxe seems to cram some new mechanism, some odd idea or some brilliant new gadget into each and every level. You’ve seen some of the tricks before in the New Super Mario Bros. Yet the real reason behind the success of Triple Deluxe is HAL’s seemingly boundless imagination. There are even fantastic sequences that see you blasting away with a hard hat-mounted cannon at blocks and artillery on the horizon, firing into the background while dodging enemy fire. Sometimes you’ll find vital keys or collectibles lurking in the background, while at other times doing something on one plane is crucial to making progress on the other. With commiserations to 2DS owners or those who can’t see stereoscopic effects, this is one of the few 3DS games where it’s worth pushing the 3D slider up.ģD also forms part of the gameplay, and not just because you sometimes have to work on the Z axis just to dodge incoming threats.įor much of the game the action takes place on both foreground and background planes, with Kirby switching between the two by leaping towards transporting stars. Bosses circle Kirby in the whole 3D space, or loom malevolently at the front of the image. It’s a game where rollercoaster trains trundle from the background to the foreground to run Kirby down, while giant hands splat him flat against the screen. Judged on graphics alone it’s one of the most exciting titles on the platform, not just filling its scrolling levels with dazzling colours and mind-boggling cartoon spectacle, but actually making good use of the 3DS’s 3D effects. Nintendo stalwarts, HAL Laboratory, has pulled out all the stops to make a 2D platformer so exuberantĪnd stuffed with goodies that it’s almost impossible to resist. OK, so it’s just another 2D platformer with 3D elements, but only in the sense that The Avengers was just another superhero film. It’s not just a decent platformer, but one of the best games to hit the Nintendo 3DS this year. Yet with Kirby: Triple Deluxe, we’re beginning to wonder whether the joke has been on us. While grown-up gamers can still revel in the antics of the little Italian plumber or his simian ex-nemesis, Donkey Kong, too many of us are all too happy to snigger at Kirby, and put his games down as ‘fine for the kids’. The little pink blob has always been the toughest sell in Nintendo’s roster not as lovable as Mario or as heroic as Link and Zelda not as dastardly as Wario or as adorable as Yoshi. Are you a Kirby-hater? No need to be ashamed – we’ve been there too.
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