Kirby’s Dream Buffet is a birthday treat, but online play spoils the party

digitaltrends.com:

Kirby is having quite the year. The pink puffball’s 30th anniversary has been one to remember thanks to the exceptional Kirby and the Forgotten Land. That would have been enough of a gift for fans, but Nintendo threw one last birthday bash in the form of Kirby’s Dream Buffet, which is available now on the Nintendo Switch eShop for $15.

The surprise multiplayer game takes elements from classic Kirby spinoffs like Kirby’s Dream Course and fuses them into a Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout-like party game. Four players compete in four rounds of minigames, gobbling up as many strawberries as possible as their Kirby balloons in size. If nothing else, its food-themed courses are sure to make you very, very hungry.

It’s a modest release, one on par with Kirby’s storied history of small-scale spinoffs, but it’s a fun one that’s full of celebratory throwbacks to the series’ past. The party is hampered by some frustrating elements though, as the game finds Nintendo’s shaky online system at its worst here.

Kirby’s Dream Buffet is a mini-gauntlet, with multiplayer rounds taking no more than 10 minutes. Players begin on a food-filled racetrack, where they’ll need to navigate an obstacle course and roll to the finish. There are some surprisingly smart dynamics at play here. Getting the most strawberries is the name of the game, so courses tempt players to take trickier routes that contain extra fruits to collect. However, it’s still a race and the prize for getting to the end first is being able to eat a stack of 50 strawberries. The other three players will have to fight over stacks of 20 and 10, so the tension comes from getting to the end as fast as possible while still collecting plenty of fruit along the way.

In between those races,