Hands on with Pikmin 3
Back when Miyamoto’s future plans could be weeded out of him by simply asking ‘what are you doing when you’re not working’, Pikmin quietly – oh so very quietly – twisted the RTS genre into some altogether simpler, more elegant than it’s bloated PC cousins. The simple task of getting a stranded spaceman home with the help of tiny vegetable men.
Hardly ‘epic’. But while Pikmin has never enjoyed the stature of Nintendo’s more legendary series, those with an apprecition for solid game design can mark each entry in the Pikmin series as a triumph. A rather timid triumph admittedly – but a triumph all the same.
Pikmin’s core remains unchanged. You take direct control of a little man – not the original Olimar, I hasten to add, rather one of a new trio – and command obedient Pikmin, little horticultural creatures plucked from the ground, gathered into packs, and used as tools to do your bidding.
This can be anything from gathering resources – more often than not, carrying fruit to feed your starving planet back home – to taking down barriers blocking your way, or attacking threatening wildlife. The more Pikmin you cultivate with resources, the more you can multi-task, the larger the enemies you can bring down, and the more efficiently you can go about your business.
This is, essentially, real-time strategy devoid of all the hard-boiled space marines, endless war, statistics and micro-mamnagement that, frankly, I always find so stressful. Pikmin is the antithesis to that.
This time around, new Pikmin are introduced to add yet another layer of strategy to the proceedings. Joining Yellow (strong) Red (impervious to fire!) and Blue (won’t drown in water) come Rock Pikmin, hardy fellows that can be thrown at objects to smash down tougher barriers. The fat Purple Pikmin (slow but strong) and terrfiying red-eyed white Pikmin resistant to poison and poisous themselves also make a comeback, with one additional new type of Pikmin that can fly at the expense of being able to do any meaningful damage.
For this hands on session, I focused my energy into two modes that sit outside the main story.
First up was Mission – this is a series of challenges designed to milk every last drop of ingenuity out of your use of Pikmin as you attempt to salvage as much fruit as possible. While they’re reasonably simple to beat – the main goal here is to complete them as efficiently as possible – splitting your Pikmin into the right teams in the right numbers and making sure you don’t cover ground needlessly.
There’s no ‘right’ way of going about this – and so Mission mode will undoubtely provide hours upon hours of depth as you try to perfect your scores. Mission can also be played in local co-op, which will is likely to cause as much heated debate about the ‘correct’ way of doing thing – as it will prove a highly rewarding long-term experience.
The second mode I managed to spend some time with was hugelyenjoyable – and a completely new experience to Pikmin. This was a competitive match of ‘Bingo Battle’. Here, two players shame the same area, with the goal of collecting the fruit detailed in a grid. The first player to strike a line though their own grid by collecting the right fruit will win the battle.
I really can’t stress enough just how excellent this mode was. Initially, players make a mad dash for the most accessible fruit – but soon players are forced to cross paths, desiring the same piece of fruit – or trying to hinder their opponent. At this point, Bingo Battle becomes a very tense battle of wits, where smarts and cunning will inevitably win out – much to the annoyance of your opponent…
It’s not often that I find ‘secondary’ multi-player mode demos that enthralling – but I could tell, even after my first match, that this was a competitve experience to be savoured – and one that I will certainly look forward to playing in more detail on release.
One thing I would also like to touch on is just how beautiful Pikmin is and one of the first Wii U games that has really struck me in terms of how much of a benefit HD is to Nintendo’s catalogue.
Unlike Nintendo’s Mushroom kingdom, Pikmin is a game, quite literally, grounded in reality.
Like having your face pushed into roadside hedge – Pikmin’s charm lies squarely in its close up representation of the real, and it’s ability to make the mundane somehow more magical. For the first time, on WiiU, this original vision is truly realised. While the new Wind Waker doesn’t really seem to benefit significantly from its HD remake – Pikmin truly shines. The hightened resolution picking out detail, colours are vivid and effects are that much more vibrant – every blade of grass, rock and bent, rusty nail looks that much more real. Pikmin’s bottom-of-the-garden game-world is all the better for it.
Pikmin 3 releases on the 13 of July
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