The Kirby games have never been the most difficult of platformers, and Kirby Mass Attack’s touch-screen controls further simplify things by removing the need for precision jump timing. Levels are designed with laid-back generosity you’ll have to think fast to get past some of the challenges, but never too terribly fast. Kirby Mass Attack solves this problem by circumventing it instead of making your controls precise, it makes the lack of precision not a big deal. Group dynamics have always been difficult for game developers it’s tough to give a player the level of precise control they’re used to having over a character when a whole group is being manipulated, and many an RTS has smashed against the rock of weak pathfinding. Reasonably skillful gameplay will quickly put you in control of a whole mess o’ Kirbys, hopping over hill and dale to confront both standard platformer challenges and obstacles that can only be bypassed by a sufficiently big Kirby troop. The game’s biggest addition from previous titles is the multi-Kirby system (that’s the “mass” that’s attacking). And Kirby Mass Attack, developed by Nintendo’s in-house all-stars, HAL Laboratory (makers of Kirby Canvas Curse, the game that first convinced me to buy a DS), is emphatically Nintendo at their best: accessible, fun, and plump with joy.
But when Nintendo is at their best, they remind me that innovation is just a delivery system for delight. It eschews many of the DS-specific controls that have made the system such a constant source of surprises in fact, there’s little about the game that couldn’t have been done on the good old Gameboy SP. Kirby Mass Attack is likely to be the last major game for the Nintendo DS, my favorite platform of this console generation simply because it’s the one that’s given me the most hours of happiness.
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