Pikmin 4 review: Collecting is now even more enticing

You can explore a beautiful garden while you are in the area. Pikmin 4, I found a tube of something called “refreshing goo.” As I instructed my small army of Pikmin, the flower-headed creatures who helped me carry things around the world, to bring it back to my spaceship, I wondered what it was — toothpaste, maybe? It was only later when I read the item’s in-game record that I realized it was actually blue paint, which the record described thusly: “Neither the color of the sky nor the color of the sea. Though it is nearly the color of both.”

Pikmin 4It’s a game that will make you laugh if you take the little things in life too seriously. This has been true of the whole series, which has always defied its initial appearance as kids’ games focused on exploration. First, the game had a lot of difficulty: Your Pikmin needed to collect items before Olimar (your space explorer) ran out of oxygen. The formula was the same, although each new version of the game had less tension, less pressure, and less time. The first game was released in Pikmin 4, you’re not playing as Olimar but as the recruit to the space program who was sent out to rescue him. As you explore the levels, you collect sparklium – a fuel for your spaceship – from treasures scattered around. By collecting more treasures, you can unlock more levels and meet castaways. They may be researchers or tourists.

Pikmin 4 not only eschews the first game’s time limit for less harsh daily in-game timers, but it also adds improvements to make keeping track of what you’re doing more streamlined. There’s a rewind function, a “go here” button that Google Maps-es you straight to your destination, and a skill for your dog companion, Oatchi, to sniff out the treasure in your area. The game also has apps to recap the plot and to show what side missions are left to be completed. This makes collecting items, the Pikmin’s main attraction easier.

Image: Nintendo EPD, Eighting/Nintendo via Polygon

There is So much love to you allThere are lots of things to collect. Each mission, quest and colored area have a counter that shows you the percentage of what you need to collect. While you only have to collect about half of what’s in a given area to move forward, watching the percentages go up (and getting to read the funny, sometimes emotional item descriptions for treasure you find) is its own reward.

Mechanically, Pikmin 4 It’s a strategy real-time game, similar to a management simulation. Your goal is to gather as many castaways (castaways are people and things) within the daily time limit. You can automate your supply line when you have enough Pikmin in your team. Factorio. This concept appears in the universe as dandoriThe priority of mission efficiency. By the 4th day, I could run multiple jobs simultaneously as I travelled back and forth on the map. But the pursuit of more efficient ways of grabbing treasure was never enough to distract me from the world’s beauty, rendered lovingly and with special attention to textures like the surface of water or the petals on a flower.

The combat was what distracted me, as I participated in multiple encounters scattered across the map. The combat is usually boiled down to simply overwhelming your opponent with Pikmin. This can get repetitive, especially when solving many of the puzzles later on involves just fighting. And unfortunately I run my Pikmin expeditions mercilessly, meaning that I regularly had to hear the cries of my dying soldiers and also my in-game co-workers’ expressions of disgust at my actions. New tower defense levels, night expeditions. Pikmin 4, are more compelling than the RTS-ish scenarios, but have the same basic issue: The best strategy isn’t to know the area or use a particular Pikmin type, but to err on the side of overwhelming numbers.

Image: Nintendo EPD, Eighting/Nintendo via Polygon

Dandori Trials are another (great) challenge that you can face in this game. In these trials, you must collect all the treasures on a level of your choice within a certain time frame. These trials were more intense and exciting than the combat, which was my favourite part of the entire game. It was like I won the Pikmin Olympics when I got a bronze on my very first attempt in a Dandori Trial. My first run was an opportunity to better understand the arena, while my second onward (and you’ll probably take more than two tries; these are tough!) These were my actual attempts to gather everything within the level. Dandori Trials is a series of escape rooms with a time limit that’s different from the main game.

These tense minigames were a relief from some of the game’s frustrating micromanagement in other areas. The action guides, which appear two to three times while you are repeating actions, will prove helpful for young players. It was less than appreciated when the team of rescuers gave away solutions to puzzles that you failed after failing them. Some things, however, are not explained at all, and you have to look through the expedition logs or wait for the team to explain it by chance. The special properties of certain colors of Pikmin, for instance, sometimes go unexplained until long after you’ve already discovered them through trial and error. The information you need is usually somewhere, but there’s little consistency: tutorials either pop up long after they’ve overstayed their welcome, or in places where you least expect them.

Image: Nintendo EPD, Eighting/Nintendo via Polygon

These issues bothered me more as the game went on, when combat started to punish my mistakes and I’d already heard the same pop-up suggestions a dozen times. It sounds like a paradox, but the game is fun when it’s either focused entirely on exploration and puzzle-solving, or when it gives you a restricted goal with a set time limit. Early on in the game, Pikmin 4The game keeps combat and solving puzzles largely separated. If they are combined, the two halves of it suffer.

The world continues to be a place of frustration, despite this. Pikmin 4 is so overflowing with cuteness and style that I couldn’t be unhappy for long. I smiled every time Oatchi ran to me or a Pikmin squealed with delight as they drank the nectar of an egg. The game’s basic gameplay concept of collecting is a great way to get you hooked. Pikmin 4The optimistic view of life on Earth. What if advanced alien explorers found joy and usefulness in what we have here — not in our greatest technologies, but in the bits and bobs we forget about in the course of a regular day? It was a natural impulse to gather all of the treasures I could find. Pikmin 4 not just because I wanted to fill out one of my many checklists, but because I wanted to see the game’s reinterpretations of human objects, a catalog full of jokes but also deep appreciation. In this way, Pikmin 4 accomplishes maybe the best thing a piece of media can do — it makes the real world seem more wondrous than it did before.

Pikmin 4 Release date for Nintendo Switch is July 21. Nintendo provided a code for a prerelease download to review the game on Switch. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.