Kirby’s Dream Buffet – Nintendo’s fall guy

metro.co.uk:

The new Kirby game for Nintendo Switch is a low budget, digital-only affair that has more than a few similarities with Fall Guys.

One advantage of Kirby being a formless pink blob is that he’s endlessly mutable, able to mould himself to fit many different genres beyond his traditional 2D platformers. Nintendo’s cheeriest but most personality-free confection had his most successful game ever in this year’s Kirby And The Forgotten Land but this low price, digital-only spin-off proves a disappointing follow-up.

Kirby’s Dream Buffet is suspiciously reminiscent of Fall Guys, Mediatonic’s breakout multiplayer hit which only come to Switch in June. Dream Buffet is a multiplayer game for up to four people, instead of Fall Guys’ 60 online players, but even so, it still manages to feel derivative and insubstantial.

As you might expect from a keenly priced download-only game, Kirby’s Dream Buffet doesn’t have any sort of storyline, but it does have a number of different modes, enabling it to be played solo (with AI bots controlling three of Kirby’s similarly blobby friends), against a friend locally on a single Switch or against up to four others online.

The universe in which the game takes place is beautifully rendered, in typical Nintendo fashion, but merely witnessing it could lead to a hardening of the arteries. It features a number of courses constructed from the most sugary of desserts, studded with fruit, but mainly composed of whipped cream, biscuits, and cake icing.

You have to race to the end of each stage, propelling Kirby like a ball, in the style of Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball. As you run over the cholesterol-packed treats and fruit that stud each stage, your Kirby grows in size and as he does so, his speed