Beat the pasta!
If you’ve ever tried to get drunk (let’s say …) to get out of work, call your wife / partner / girlfriend / roommate to advise you to throw the dough because you were coming in and with hunger from wolves, only then stay locked in some traffic jams, then you know exactly what Captain Olimar’s feelings are like.
Just as he is on his way home, waiting to re-embrace his family, he comes across an asteroid bench that damages his ship so much that it forces him to land a fortune on a nearby planet.
Unfortunately, ours is still lucky enough, as instead of meeting alien killers and ecosystems damaging to health, rushes to a small earthly paradise, where vegetation is lush and covers most of the planet.
Nevertheless, he wants to find lombard, that is, the fuel of his spaceship, if you want to start your journey home: here, then, Olimar first ventures around the shuttle, and then further in search of the precious mineral .
After a few steps, the captain comes across a handful of red picks, who, initially frightened by his presence, seem to respond to his whistle, as has always been for the colorful esseries: hence, as by Nintendo’s tradition, he breaks down soon a lightweight, just mentioned note, useful to push the player to explore the many levels of play from top to bottom.
The cutting of dialogues (entirely subtitled in Italian, without speaking), the level of difficulty and the visual aspect immediately betray the target of production, which does not prevent even the most mature ones from relaxing with their tender Pikmin army : Just do not expect scripts from Oscar and well-outlined characters because the saga never needed, and the Arzest product is not a rule exception.
Strategy in two dimensions
Hey! Pikmin’s gameplay represents a curious hybrid between a two-dimensional platform platform, calibrated on pretty syncopated rhythms, and a kind of simplified real-time strategy, where you can best use the small army of Pikmin available, which in any case never reaches the size of the regular chapters of the saga: in the stages where we did not lose it, we counted a little of Pikmin’s twelve to the maximum in our crap, which gives the idea of overall product depth.
The player begins each level (with some exception scattered along the way) without Pikmin, pointing to the road with a noticeable use of his whistle: the spawn points of the beehives are multiple for each stage, so never leave without “labor” too less aware users who have left behind some allies or left it in the meal to the many, nasty animals that populate the planet where the events take place.
Captain Olimar is not more athletic and is somewhat limited in movements, not to mention the total uselessness in combat: unable to jump, helpless in front of the animals above, he relies on his Pikmin for every action, from the simplest, how to retrieve Lumbus out of its reach, indiscriminate attack against enemies.
The control system generally behaves more than good, allowing you to move Olimar with the analog stick and to give orders to Pikmin via the touch screen, taking advantage of the fact that, in the absence of 3D functionality, both screens can be exploited to display the action.
Like the majority of the titles that intensely exploit the interaction between nib and touch screen, however, Hey! Pikmin forces the console with one hand (the left, for the right-handers) while the other holds the nib: this posture, especially in the case of prolonged gaming sessions (in our case, after a couple of hours) and the presence of a XL model, caused some wrist fatigue.
