Your favorite adorable worker bees are back, this time with even more varieties!
What Is It? Pikmin 4 is the first new entry in the Pikmin series in a decade. The game is Nintendo’s take on the real-time strategy genre. Simplifying and cutifying the proceeding to create an incredibly approachable game that is perfect for genre novices but fun enough for veterans to enjoy.
In Pikmin 4, you create your own space adventurer who is sent out to rescue an entire crew of missing astronauts who went missing looking for their beloved Captain Olimer. Upon landing on the planet, you are quickly greeted by Oatchi, a service dog who is a new addition to the series. From there, you begin meeting various Pikmin types, learning how to spawn more of them, and your adventure begins.
The basic gameplay loop is that you land on a specific spot in one of a few maps that eventually open, from there you select your Pikmin and start exploring for the day. You can take out three different Pikmin types at a time, each having their own strengths such as swimming, fire resistance, heavy/light, etc… Each day has a limited amount of time and the core idea is to explore, battle enemies, discover and retrieve treasures, and find anything new along the way. Pikmin 4 brings the return of subterranean areas, with each map having a handful. These freeze the running clock and allow you to explore them free of time constraints. Most have a few different sublevels and at least one lost astronaut to retrieve.
Continue exploring, fighting, mining, and collecting until you have enough treasure to get to the stage Olimer is in. Rescue him, then you see the credits.
Pikmin 4 throws a few wrinkles in the basic formula, however. One is that there are Pikmin collecting races throughout, referred to as Dandori Challenges. These are rated on a one-to-five difficulty scale and pit you against a CPU team to see who can collect the most treasure in a limited amount of time. There is also a tower-defense like mode played through at nighttime in which you have to grow your hoard of glowing Pikmin in order to fend off attacks on your base from a steady stream of enemies.
The core gameplay will be familiar here, but the game is a few steps beyond what any of the other entries in the series do in terms of variety. There are eight different Pikmin types to find, the aforementioned level varieties, Oatchi, and a large amount of post game content. Taken as a whole, this can be a bit overwhelming but ultimately does succeed in providing a great Pikmin experience with new wrinkles.
The Best Part: Oatchi! A space pup that you can both send to attack/dig/retrieve AND ride/swim around to move you, and your Pikmin, through the world more quickly. It’s a wonderful addition and some of the small things it adds are wonderful touches of convenience; like being able to ram into a breakable wall while riding Oatchi and having all of your Pikmin automatically hop off and start breaking down the wall. Oatchi also jumps which allows a very tiny bit of verticality the other games didn’t. Finally, you can control Oatchi independently, like you could switch between astronauts in prior games, which opens up a few different puzzles to solve.
The Worst Part: I’m mixed on the post game content. On one hand, it is great to let people get a mostly breezy 15-17 hour experience and see the credits. Nothing will be too challenging for series veterans, but it is all fun enough to enjoy. However, I think a lot of people, myself potentially included, will miss out on a lot the game has to offer with so much hiding in the post game. Immediately after seeing the credits, for example, a new area unlocks. The new parts are tougher and certainly a delight for those who want more, but as someone who typically doesn’t engage much in post game content, I’m always a bit weary of seeing a substantial chunk of content after the credits.
The Verdict: Pikmin 4 takes the series to new places through a much wider variety of gameplay experiences compared to the first three entries. It is entirely up to the user as to whether or not that is a positive or a negative. While Pikmin 3 is still the peak of the series for me, I will say that everything Pikmin 4 throws at you does work, and it works well. There is stuff I didn’t even touch on in this review like a tech shop, Oatchi skill upgrades, various in-game goals, and so on. There is a substantial amount of content that is new to the series and, again, individually it all works quite well. Throw it all together and you have another great Pikmin game, even if some players might miss the simplicity of prior entries.
How to Play: Nintendo Switch
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