This fast-approaching competitive multiplayer title will be the next spin-off in the Kirby series after the acclaimed mainline entry that was Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Kirby’s Dream Buffet opens with Kirby being shrunk to a minuscule size by the Dream Fork, giving him the perfect opportunity to gorge himself on titanic desserts. Three other Kirby’s appear alongside Master Hand, Crazy Hand, and some Waddle Dees, and the four puffballs get to work competing to see who can eat the most. It’s clearly based on the classic Kirby Super Star minigame Gourmet Race, but it also draws a lot of obvious inspiration from the contemporary competitive multiplayer title Fall Guys.
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Fall Guys Sets The Stage for Kirby’s Dream Buffet
It’s difficult for anyone who’s seen Fall Guys in action not to draw several parallels with Kirby’s Dream Buffet. The two games are cut from the same cloth, both focusing on multiplayer action and similar colorful art styles. Kirby’s worlds consist entirely of dessert while Fall Guys stages can be made of anything from similar sweets to woodland areas to abstract shapes and machines. Kirby and the Fall Guys beans look similar, and can both be heavily customized with costumes and colors unlocked through play.
That play is deliberately simple, with most of the onus put on moving and jumping with deliberately awkward controls. Fall Guys characters waddle everywhere and can interfere with one another through body blocking and grabbing, while the four Kirby’s all rely on rolling like in some past Kirby spin-offs. The Kirby’s can also attack one another, but in their case they can take advantage of power-ups based on Kirby’s Copy Abilities. Although these abilities might appear more destructive than the mundane shoving in Fall Guys, they won’t instantly stop another Kirby from winning.
Kirby’s Dream Buffet Diverges From Fall Guys
There may be a lot of similarities between Kirby’s Dream Buffet and Fall Guys, but those serve to highlight the massive differences between the two games. The first and probably biggest is that Kirby’s Dream Buffet is not a battle royale, and may not even be a live service title. Even though it is a competitive party game with the same general structure of races, minigames, and some kind of final challenge, it only hosts four human players per match. Unlike Fall Guys, these players cannot lose a match until the final results are tallied. The goal is to collect as many strawberries as possible, not just place the highest to qualify for the next round. Placing high yields more rewards, but neither it nor knocking a player off of a course will guarantee their failure.
Kirby’s Dream Buffet always alternates between racecourses that emphasize collecting strawberries and power-ups, and mini games that see the Kirby’s competing for strawberries. Fall Guys, on the other hand, almost always starts with a straightforward race, and then jumps between a variety of specialized courses that can do anything from dividing players into teams to forcing them to solve logic puzzles. Fall Guys’ final rounds are similarly diverse, while Kirby’s Dream Buffet always concludes with the hybrid of a Super Smash Bros. match and Mario Party’s Bumper Balls game. Combined with the ability to play offline with another player, Kirby’s Dream Buffet is an overall more structured and relaxed take on Fall Guys’ chaotic and tense Battle Royale parties.
Kirby’s Dream Buffet will be released August 17, exclusively for Nintendo Switch.
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