Pikmin 4 Switch Review

I find gardening to be such a peaceful and calming experience and could spend my day tending to my plants and flowers before I started traveling. Much like fishing, gardening to me meant I could forget my worries and unwind. Shigeru Miyamoto said he was inspired to create Pikmin after tending to his garden and watching the ants march by, so it’s rather fitting that this RTS/Puzzler hybrid tends to be a relaxing and immersive experience with some challenges in between.

Pikmin 4 flips the formula of previous Pikmin games by casting you in the role of a custom character who is a part of the Rescue Corps sent to save Captain Olimar. Your mission is to not only find Olimar but rescue the rest of your team after a rough landing forced them to jettison into escape pods. With each team member rescued, you unlock new aspects of the game from training Otachi, your faithful rescue pup, to creating new items such as frost bombs and fireproof space suits. Each character has their own personality and charm and communication is informative without anyone grating on you taking you out of the game. The only character I found slightly annoying really was the Dandori guy, but more on that later.

Pikmin 4 is easily one of the best (if not the best) looking games on the Nintendo Switch. The miniature world you explore is full of wonder and whimsy as you explore the ever-expanding gardens of the world. Enemies are as beautifully rendered as the world they inhabit and while taking notes and playing Pikmin 4 for this review, I often found myself so immersed in the game I forgot to capture footage. The treasures you discover are gorgeously detailed, and I found myself smiling at the throwbacks to Nintendo Hardware like the Gameboy Advance and Classic Nes controllers. All of the treasures are given some clever names in similar vain to the Lego Movie’s Lord Business. It’s these sorts of details that add to the wonder of the game, appealing to the older gamers’ sense of nostalgia like myself, while also tending to the younger audience with more recent items.

The environments feel massive as flowers and pot plants loom over your character, watering cans, buckets, and garden chairs tower in the distance like skyscrapers, and sprinklers create torrential obstacles for you and your loyal team to overcome.

Gameplay is a hybrid mix of adventure and real-time strategy as you explore the world opening up new paths to find more treasure for your expedition. Combat has more depth than the earlier titles as you can mount Otachi and charge Pikmin onto enemies, lock onto targets, and manage your Pikmin easier thanks to the intuitive control scheme. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements made in Pikmin 4, Including a new rewind feature that helps undo costly mistakes. And Mistakes you will make as you discover new enemy types while wandering around the wild world of Pikmin 4.

The game is much larger than its predecessors, meaning it won’t be able to be knocked over in a single weekend like Pikmin 1 or 2 for instance.

Night missions offer a new aspect to the game and are presented as a tower defense-style game. You face off against hordes of aggressive native fauna armed with a new glow-type Pikmin. The first phase is to gather special crystals to increase your army of glowing Pikmin, and the second phase is when the creatures attack. It’s a really cool addition to the game and while it could have been implemented as a gimmick, it ties in with the overarching mission of the game.

Dungeons make a welcome return, creating great little challenges, usually consisting of finding upgrades to expand your army, and more hidden treasure to further your cause. While puzzles and challenges are more manageable in Pikmin 4, I feel that Nintendo has struck a great balance in welcoming newcomers to the series while also catering to fans who have been around since the Game Cube Era. The difficulty curve gently pushes upward the further you go along without being a frustrating experience. There are some boss battles that can catch you off guard, and I found I lost all 50 of my Pikmin at one stage, leaving me devastated. Thankfully, the rewind feature kicked in and let me take a second crack at the boss.

Dandori battles are a new addition in which the player is pitted against a Leafling to race against the clock as you horde more treasure than your opponent. The treasure you collect doesn’t count towards your main collection but does unlock other items to assist with your journey. While the Dandori battles can be exciting, I found the head-to-head battles a breeze but the solo Dandori missions provided a more taxing challenge. The Dandori NPC is a bit annoying though, but that’s probably more my impatience to explore more being interrupted by the Dandori character.

All in all, Pikmin 4 is a beautiful game that was built to be enjoyed by veterans and newcomers alike. It’s so easy to get lost in the vibrant and dynamic miniature world that has been so lovingly crafted under the direction of Yutaka Hiramuki at Nintendo. As I long-standing fan of the series, I was concerned the game would be diluted to appease a newer audience, but that worry was quickly washed away and replaced with a smile on my face for nearly the entire time playing. I know new players will enjoy this foray into the world of PNF-404, and I hope that it spurs this wonderful series into the spotlight it so genuinely deserves.

So What’s it Like?

While Pikmin is a unique experience, the closest I could compare it to would be Mario Odyssey and Katamari Damacy