Strange things seem to always happen to pink and plushy Kirby. He was banished to Patch Land and forced to travel through a world made of fabric in Kirby’s Epic Yarn. In Kirby’s Pinball Land, the pink tough guy got slapped around pinball stages. And there was that other time he was rendered limbless and forced to roll the through the hills of a transformed Dream Land in Kirby Canvas Curse. You could start to presume that Kirby has gone through it all. Yet if you look at the series as a whole, for every Kirby game that feels like a by-the-numbers-platformer (stern glance at Kirby Squeak Squad), a game with a more experimental approach (like the ones mentioned above) appears to remind us that Kirby games can try something very different and succeed.
Kirby Mass Attack falls into the more experimental category of Kirby games. Developed by HAL Laboratory, Mass Attack has the titular hero split into ten mini-Kirbys (oh no!), and you control this rampaging pack of (up to ten) mini-Kirbys through a variety of taps, tugs, and flicks of your DS stylus. Nintendo recently showed me some of the more challenging aspects of Mass Attack, and its point-and-flick mechanics, as representatives for the Japanese company took me on a tour through a handful stages found in two of the game’s five worlds.
