Kirby and the Forgotten Land review: Waddle Dee-lightful

digitaltrends.com:

Is there any video game series as joyful as Kirby? The second I booted Kirby and the Forgotten Land up for the first time, I broke out into a cheerful grin. After a month spent exploring post-apocalyptic wastelands, I was happy to watch the pink puffball pitter-patter around colorful landscapes without a care in the world.

Hilariously, Kirby and the Forgotten Land actually is a post-apocalyptic game. Kirby is sucked into another world filled with decaying shopping malls and abandoned amusement parks from a seemingly dead civilization. Its world actually isn’t too far off from that of Horizon Forbidden West, just swapping robots for dastardly foxes. The difference is that the setting doesn’t stop Kirby from treating it like his own personal playground — and buffet.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is an adorable platformer cut from the same cloth as Nintendo’s finest. The game’s absurd Mouthful Mode is an especially strong gimmick that lets developer Hal Laboratory get more playful and comedic with the series. It loses some steam when it runs out of ideas, but its story and levels never fail to charm me.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the first 3D Kirby game since the Nintendo 64’s Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, but it’s not a radical reinvention of the series. It still very much feels like a traditional 2D Kirby game and that’s a good thing. Kirby has always been a secret weapon in Nintendo’s first-party arsenal, providing smooth puzzle-platforming that’s easy on the brain. That’s exactly what you get here, with the game sharing more similarities to Super Mario 3D World than Super Mario Odyssey.

As always, the game is built around Kirby’s insatiable appetite. He can suck up enemies to gain new powers, like fire breath,