Kirby And The Forgotten Land review – the anti-Elden Ring

metro.co.uk:

Nintendo’s little pink platformer has his Breath Of The Wild moment but is The Forgotten Land really the best Kirby game ever?

It’ll seem peculiar at first, but the other game you’re going to constantly hear about in connection with Kirby And The Forgotten Land is Elden Ring. Not because the games have anything in common in terms of gameplay but because they exist at opposite ends of the difficulty spectrum, with many arguing that Elden Ring is too hard and that the Kirby games are too easy. However, what’s clear from playing both franchises recently is that this is not a problem for either game.

Elden Ring’s astounding financial success seems to instantly put an end to arguments that its difficulty is off-putting for the majority and, while it’s never been nearly as popular in Europe, the Kirby franchise has been highly successful for exactly 30 years now. A lot of the standard 2D platformer entries do tend to blur into one another, but this is the mainline series’ first foray into 3D and it’s easily one of the best ever.

When we say 3D we’re not talking some expansive open world adventure but a much more constrained experience, somewhat in the style of Super Mario 3D World. The restrictions this brings means the gameplay is still very similar to the older titles, and that includes traditional flaws such as being too short and just a tad too repetitive. It balances this out though with one key feature: two-player co-op.

Apart from the low difficulty, the other common criticism aimed at the Kirby games is that that they feature a more saccharine style of cuteness than other Nintendo games, with none of the self-awareness of Super Mario or visual inventiveness of the Yoshi games. That’s still true of The Forgotten Land but