Nintendo recently released a trailer on all of their platforms for an upcoming game, Kirby's Dream Buffet. It appears to be a cute game where four players race and battle against each other. It all ties together with a sugary theme for all the levels and obstacles in place. You could call it a sweet spin on the racing genre that the series of Kirby games is already familiar with.
The trailer has received mostly positive reception on Nintendo's YouTube channel. While some are excited to be racing as Kirby again, many people are just satisfied with how adorable the game looks. However, there are people on all sides who have thought something similar upon first viewing the trailer: the gameplay and general concept look a lot like Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (more commonly referred to as just Fall Guys) is a cute battle royale game where a huge amount of characters race and battle against each other across many different obstacle courses and minigames. While it's not the first and only game with this concept, it's definitely become the most popular example in recent years. That popularity has only increased, with the latest update making it free to play and the game's addition to other gaming platforms' libraries, including the Nintendo Switch. It seems fair at first glance to compare it to Kirby's Dream Buffet after looking at the latter's trailer. I'd even say that it's natural to think that the two games are similar, but the core concepts do differ in vital ways.
As cute as the trailer is, it doesn't give us many details about the game. To understand how Kirby's Dream Buffet differs from Fall Guys, then, let's consider what Kirby's Dream Buffet is. For that, we can go to the game's official page on Nintendo's website. The game's page states the following: "Roll through a smorgasbord of food-themed stages in 4 rounds of 4-player fun as Kirby ... who seems rounder than usual? Race through delicious obstacle courses to collect strawberries as Kirby grows. Then, turn the tides in the final round- a fruity fight atop a floating platform." From this, we can already see a few key differences between Kirby's Dream Buffet and Fall Guys.
Number Of Players And Rounds
The first and biggest difference between the two is the number of players and rounds. In Fall Guys, up to 60 players can compete against each other in a single game. The number of rounds that take place in that game can range from two to six and beyond. The range in the rounds is due to the 67 different minigames that can take place within those rounds. The way the game handles having such a huge amount of players also plays a part in that inconsistency, which we'll get into next.
- RELATED: Fall Guys July 6th Patch Notes
Although it seemed like there were more players (in the form of Waddle Dees) in the trailer, the video description and website for Kirby's Dream Buffet state that it's only a 4-player game. The website also specifies that the number of rounds in Kirby's Dream Buffet are also limited to just four. That implies that Kirby's Dream Buffet will be an experience that's not nearly as chaotic or unpreditable as Fall Guys is.
Round Progression
The next difference is in how the two games progress in rounds. As the full name of Fall Guys implies, the competition advances as players get knocked out of the game. The way this occurs is entirely dependent on the minigame. When you're knocked out, no matter which round it is, you're completely done and can't win that competition anymore. This elimination system is how the game handles having such a huge amount of players in one competition at a time.
Kirby's Dream Buffet looks like it won't have such an elimination system in place. Even if you lose a round, you should be able to keep playing, up to the fourth and final round of the game. This makes it so that you'll always have a chance of winning the game, even if you'll be at a disadvantage in the final round. That disadvantage brings us to the next key difference between the two games.
Gameplay
The next difference, and probably the most important, is gameplay. In Fall Guys, the gameplay is very simple. You just move, jump and dive towards your goal. Very little is done to change that across the 67 minigames. Sometimes you may grab things, even when you don't have to (you know who you are). The simplicity works in the game's favor because it forces Mediatonic, its developer, to think outside the box to make many creative minigames.
Kirby's Dream Buffet is somewhat simple too. Throughout the races, you can roll, jump and bump against your opponents. However, you can also make use of different abilities. The trailer showed off some abilities being in use, resembling the Wheel ability, Tornado ability, and Stone ability. All of these abilities help you collect strawberries, which will make Kirby steadily increase in size as players grab more of them. The increased size seems like it'll also increase the efficiency of the abilities when you use them. With these things in mind, the gameplay of Kirby's Dream Buffet has a bit more depth to it than that of Fall Guys, and perhaps a dose of extra strategy.
Fall Guys and Kirby's Dream Buffet may have some similarities when you take a glance at them. But upon inspecting them, you can see that they differ in a variety of ways. Outlining those differences wasn't for the intention of making one game seem better or worse than the other in any way. It was more to give Kirby's Dream Buffet an arena of its own, a purpose to stand alongside the game it's being compared to. Even with Fall Guys' simple gameplay, elimination system, and chaotic premise, it remains a great game that's a lot of fun to play. As for Kirby's Dream Buffet, we'll have to see how long the fun lasts when it releases sometime during this summer.