Kirby's Blowout Blast (Nintendo 3DS) Review

The usual Kirby gameplay is a little cut down for Kirby's Blowout Blast. The little salmon sphere can still inhale cutesy enemies and spit them back out as speeding projectiles, though. The ability to inhale multiple enemies at once returns, too. Kirby can still hop and inhale air to bounce along through the air, but he has sadly lost his copy ability, no longer able to take on the powers of those he devours. Instead, the gameplay is based around making wise use of the ammunition available to him to gain the highest score possible on each stage.

The stages themselves comprise of Kirby traversing a simple, top-down, 3D area, collecting coins and being fenced into little areas where enemies appear in waves. The mechanics of firing the contents of Kirby's mouth into the various enemies is a basic exercise in trigonometry, guiding the enemies into a line and hitting as many as possible at once for score multipliers.

Despite the eShop detailing this as "across 25+ stages" there are actually well over double that here. Each stage only lasts a few minutes and the focus is on attaining a high score and achieving a rating. There are modifiers to get bonus points in each stage, too - collecting all coins, defeating all enemies, getting through the stage very quickly, and taking no damage. Racking up a high enough score grants a gold rating on the stage - there's a platinum, too, for the best players - and getting gold on all stages within a world unlocks an "Ex" world to take on with more challenging levels. Getting a gold score on every stage in every world unlocks a single level entitled "Secret Path" that gives a series of five stages that have to be completed back-to-back within the overall time limit of 18 minutes. This Secret Path is a decent challenge filled with powered-up boss battles that require quick reflexes.

Overall, the game is a little too easy, sadly; gathering up even the gold score on pretty much every level is a simple task. There are a handful of boss fights that offer more of a challenge, but even these are simple enough to overcome once the bosses' patterns are understood. Where the real challenge comes is achieving platinum ratings, which require perfect runs through each stage and are ideal introductions for newbie speed-runners. The low difficulty level is completely forgiveable, though, as it makes the game more inclusive to a wider audience, which, hopefully, will gather new gamers to the pink puffball's future adventures.

Blowout Blast looks surprisingly good, too, with some solid models and a soundtrack filled with familiar themes from the series. It achieves this by reusing assets from recent titles, delivering a much higher quality presentation that belies the low cost.