Kirby: Triple Deluxe: the totally competent platformer

The Nintendo 3DS isn’t the same surprisingly great handheld it was a year ago, but it’s a system that still routinely churns out good games thanks almost exclusively to Nintendo franchises. Mario Golf and Kirby Triple Threat, both available at exactly the same time, are a rare double-scoop of gaming for the 3DS. Neither is a world-beater, but both are really good, and more than worth your time.

Kirby: Triple Deluxe is a charming Kirby side-scrolling platformer, with the standard bunch of power-up hats and clever use of foreground-background gaming, where enemies and even Kirby will hop in and out of the screen.

It’s called Triple Deluxe because there are two other game modes thrown in: a rhythm-action game with several levels, and a Smash Brothers-like game pitting various Kirby forms against each other. The Kirby fighter doesn’t work online, though, only via local play. It’s a bit of a tease just months before Smash Brothers hits 3DS, but it’s a nice extra.

You’re bound to have fun with Triple Deluxe, even if it’s a lot of the same platforming mechanics you’ve played so many times before. The main story mode of Deluxe is hefty enough and is split up in stages that take about 10-20 minutes to complete.

If you’ve finished all the other colorful cartoon 2D platform games in the 3DS stable, and there are a ton, Kirby’s another really good one to dive into. It’s not a genre the 3DS needs more of, but it’s one of the better Kirby games in years, which isn’t a bad thing at all.

If Triple Deluxe has anything significant to say about the 3DS, its that the console has just about hit its capacity for side-scrolling platforming games. The vast majority of recent titles that are worth a go all blur into the same genre. Such a surplus of similarly styled games can damped the market. With that, the 3DS just might be running into its next great hurdle: a lack of variety with software.