Hello and welcome back to another installation of Drew reviews video games! This week, I will be covering the newest installment of the Kirby series, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I would like to open up by first mentioning the fact that I am a long time Kirby fan, first getting gifted Kirby Super Star Ultra on the DS, so I may be a little biased. Picture this: you just get home from a grudgingly long eight hour shift at your occupation of choice, your phone has been going off for a solid ten minutes. You finally pull out my phone and see it: a new Kirby game has been announced. At this time, I one-hundred percent did not geek out and immediately found out that I can pre order it the day of. Even though I was dead-broke at the time, I spent sixty bucks to buy it. After this, it was a tense six months waiting and seeing to avoid leaks online, but finally on March the 25th, I went into my local Gamestop at 9pm on a Friday and picked up the game. I was ecstatic. And let me tell you, it was worth the hype filled wait.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land has to be on my list for the best games on the Nintendo Switch, which is a very high bar. Kirby and The Forgotten Land hits all the bars of not only a good game,  but also an even better Kirby game. It takes the formulaic Kirby game 2d platformer and twists it into something as great, if not better, than the original games. The way they approached adapting Kirby from a 2d game to a 3d game was very similar to an equally awesome game, Mario Odyssey. The games are actually pretty close to each other in many ways, the main differences being that Mario Odyssey is an open world exploration game, while Kirby is a closed track adventure game. 

Kirby and The Forgotten Land has several qualities of a great game, having excellent artistic design, fantastic gameplay, and an even better soundtrack. First off, I would like to mention that the game is absolutely stunning in a delightfully weird way. The game starts off with Kirby and his friends being sucked into a foreign world. The world is an oddly dystopian cityscape of a long gone race of, presumably, humans. While this sounds like a terrifying science fiction novel about life after the fall of the human race, it manages to never feel deeply disturbing and always feels like a cheery fun experience overall. The game takes you through several themed areas through this cityscape, from carnival circuses to icy industrial zones, all with unique interesting boss fights at the end of an average of a few levels. The general gameplay feels fantastic as well, very smooth and fluid, perfect for a true platformer Kirby game. There are several new and returning copy abilities in the game, and an entire option to actually upgrade the abilities. This seems like a small change, but it feels super fun! You find the materials to upgrade them by exploring the level and completing the several challenges that the game throws at you. The boss battles are fun and intuitive, especially later in the game. The main gameplay loop is playing through the levels, completing several tasks to save the several Waddle-Dees, Kirby’s friends, and take them back to a safe place: The Village. The Village is a place where you can do several fun things and minigames, such as the colosseum. This is where you fight gauntlet style against the several bosses of the game, and maybe a guest star friend from another game. The boss battles in particular have absolutely awesome tracks from the already great Kirby song list. There are several remixes and rehashes of original Kirby songs, all of which are original and reused for good reason.

Overall, Kirby and The Forgotten Land is a wonderful game with the only true flaw being the level of difficulty being very low overall. Everything else: the music, the gameplay, and the general design is wonderful. As an official Average Joe video game guy, I have to give Kirby and The Forgotten Land a solid 8.6/10.