Pikmin 4

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Pikmin 4 is very good. Very addictive. But it's not a masterpiece by any standards. The environments are very beautiful and the pikmins are still very cute... ...but it is very repetitive and the new pikmins and ability don't really do much to break the monotony. Also it's very annoying to get back to the hub at the end of every days to upgrade (with loading times that are much too long) Lastly the controls are pretty annoying (especially with the dog) and I found myself sacrificing pikmins way too often because the wrong type was auto selected or some automatic order was triggered So... it's a fun game... it's rather well **** it's definitely not a 90% game it's a very solid 70% game. Well polished but lacking

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I'm a huge Pikman fan. I played 1 and 2 on the Gamecube, 1 and 2 on the Wii, Pikmin 3 on the Wii U, and Pikmin 3 Deluxe on the Switch. This is easily the worst Pikmin game out of the series. 1. The controls are overcomplicated and poorly implemented This game has a lot of buttons that you can press. I found myself fumbling the controls 10 hours into the game still. There's just too many buttons to remember, all of which are extremely contextual. The game stops you from throwing more than the minimum Pikmin required onto objects. 2. The dog takes too much focus away There's a progression tree for the dog, and the dog can pretty much do everything the Pikmin can do. Pikmin latch onto the dog, which takes away the feeling of having a mass army trailing you. Some tasks REQUIRE the dog too. 3. There is a really bad auto-lock on in this game. You can't turn it off. There's an auto-lock feature that causes your cursor to snap onto enemies and objects. It's really sticky and I couldn't get used to it. Some may find this helpful if they have trouble aiming in games, but it can be really hard to target the enemy you want with the auto-lock. The manual lock-on isn't great as it randomly decides to disengage. 4. The game constantly backseats you The characters in this game never shut up. They will constantly backseat you. If you leave a Pikmin unplucked, they will remind you to pluck it every few minutes. If a single Pikmin catches fire, they will tell you to whistle it back. They state the obvious no matter how many hours you've been playing for. 5. The tutorials drag out for forever Pikmin 1, 2, and 3 gave you access to Pikmin and the core "Pikmin" experience of growing your army fairly quickly after a minimum of 2 minutes. In this game, it takes about 30 minutes (if you don't skip the dialogue, about 10 minutes if you do) in order for you to get access to an Onion and grow your Pikmin. Even after this, the game constantly interrupts you for another hour with cutscenes telling you what each and everything does. 6. The game tells you what Pikmin to use The game recommends what type of Pikmin you should bring. Every area in this game can be completed with the three recommended Pikmin. The dungeons in this game also tell you what Pikmin you should bring, and automatically sets your squad of Pikmin to those types. You can change it after the fact, but there's hardly any ever reason to change your Pikmin up. On top of this, there is a 3 Pikmin type limit that stops you from mixing up your squad in unique ways. There is no strategy or thought to what Pikmin you want to bring out. 7. The writing in this game is atrocious, and the story is convoluted. All of the dialogue in this game is completely flat. It's not even memorable or laughable bad. It's just garbage text with no meaning constantly being spewed at the screen. All of the characters are one note. The story retcons the events of Pikmin 1 and so it desperately tries to make the stories of 2 and 3 make sense, but it fails to do that. 8. The game is too long and has no replayability The entire game is progression based. Once I put this game down I got sick to my stomach at the thought of having to play the game again and do the progression mechanics all over again. The length of the game actively harms the good of it. To 100% the game's campaign, it takes about 20 hours. Speaking of which... 9. There is no mission mode The campaign in this game is more or less the only way to play. You can play the Dandori Battles mode against your friend or against a CPU, but you have to unlock all the maps through the story. Get bent if you want to download this game and play against a friend. Gotta unlock it all first. 10. The co-op in this game is not true co-op Player 2 is forced to throw pebbles and items. They don't get to play as a captain. 11. Too many puzzles Half the caves in this game are puzzles. Not a whole lot of strategy, just puzzling. Some may enjoy this more, but I didn't. 12. The music in this game is generic and forgettable The music in this game is... can I say this? Can I just say it's flat out garbage? Not a single one of the songs stuck with me. Almost all of it is generically whimsical. Any returning tracks are butchered beyond belief and don't fit in the game. 13. You don't blast off into lower orbit This is a "returning fans" opinion, but one of the most memorable things about Pikmin was flat-out removed. You instead go off and land somewhere else on the planet. Doesn't ruin the game, but it's still worthwhile to mention, I think. Character limit stops me from talking about the positives, but the negatives end up outweighing the positives in the end. Pikmin 4 feels less like a strategy game and more like a puzzle adventure game. It feels like it wanted to be mainstream and streamlined too much and so all in all it was a fairly forgettable experience compared to the original trilogy.