Screenshots :.
Wii Play: Pikmin 2
Wii
Matt
28-04-2009
"Aww, look at 'em!"
"Product placement?!"
"And so we went to war on two fronts."
"Fight guys, fight!"
"That'll be worth a bit o' cash methinks!"
There are two bits to reviewing the new Wii Play Pikmin 2, so I thought it best that I set that out for you guys right now. See, on the one hand we have one of the finest games the Wii has to offer, with a lovely, cutesy visual style belying a tactical, strategic experience. It’s perfectly suited to the control scheme too, which really helps give it the advantage over the older GameCube version that came out back in 2004 during the GameCube’s decline. On the other hand, it is an game that you can now pick up for £10 on eBay in its original form, and new control scheme or not it doesn’t ever quite justify the price point.
Let’s concentrate on the good first, as there really is much to recommend here. Picking up from where the original (excellent, and available on Wii Play) Pikmin left off, Captain Olimar has returned home from his adventures to find that his space haulage company is going bust. Not even having so much time as time go and see his little bobblehead wife or son, he’s packed off with a bumbling cohort called Louie and sent off to a planet – pretty obviously Earth – to collect everyday trash to pay off the debt. There I was thinking I had it tough!
At a very basic level, the idea is that as Olimar and/or Louie you stroll around the little levels you get sent to picking little coloured plants called Pikmin, who will then follow you around and complete various tasks for you such as building bridges, fighting enemies and carrying objects back to your ship. However, Pikmin 2 takes this and adds plenty of new options to the player than the first game, which in turn makes the fact you can divide Olimar and Louie into two separate parties a boon.
Initially, this isn’t really a consideration you have to make as the levels and tasks are smaller and packed in enough for you to be able to all stroll around in one happy clappy group taking things on as you find them. Your little Pikmin come in a variety of colours, with the reds (immune against fire), yellows (protected from electricity) and blues (aquatic) returning once more to be used in the various natural situations you find. Pretty quickly you’ll get the idea that lobbing a group of yellow Pikmin at a fire-breathing monster is a totally naff idea; likewise, sending a group of reds to cross a shallow pond is asking for all sorts of silly bother.
Added into this for the second game are the big fat biffa purple Pikmin, who are effectively ten Pikmin in one little fat dude and are great for wiping out enemies, and the ghostly little white fellas that can withstand poison and sense buried treasure. The catch with these little guys is that they are in finite supply as opposed to the others that can be harvested infinitely, meaning that once you have exhausted all the flowers from which they are produced you are not going to be getting any more. Obviously, this also means that should you run out of either type you are not going to get 100% completion, although the loss of either type won’t mean you can’t pick up enough objects to pay of your 10,000 Pokos debt.
Hence, it turns into a big fat treasure hunt, with you venturing around the various landscapes doing little tasks in order to pick up the various objects you need and carry them back to your ship for payment. With Olimar and crew being approximately 2cm in height everything is thus super sized and even something as innocuous as a stick of lipstick or an upside-down mug needs quite the little troop to carry off, so you’ll need to be gathering the Pikmin tokens as quickly as you can and ferrying them back to each of the basic types’ spaceships in order to grow more and more.
As you delve deeper into the game, it does more and more to separate itself from its predecessor. The most striking change is the introduction of caves, into which you dive with your gathering of Pikmin and pretty much dungeon crawl your way through the various levels as you pick up treasure and tackle tricky end bosses. It works beautifully as a risk-reward dynamic, with the amount of Pikmin in your crew being set the moment you enter the cave and none being available to expand your army as you progress. Balancing up a mixed group of all types is crucial, as you never know what obstacles and tasks you’ll be facing in order to pick up the treasure and hence you really need to put a good deal of thought into things before you go diving in willy-nilly.
Another main change is the introduction of Louie, with control of each commander being switched via tapping the minus button. The further you get into the game the bigger the challenges that face you are, so assigning a couple of types of Pikmin to Olimar and controlling him over one side of the map whilst you take Louie and another bunch the other way to carry out something else becomes somewhat of a godsend. You may, for example, decide that Louie can go west and knock down a poisoned wall with white Pikmin whilst having the purples there to add a bit of muscle should they get into a fight, whilst Olimar might head east and trudge through a pond with a team of blues so he can build a connecting bridge to a patch of land, hence allowing all types of Pikmin to access new areas which perhaps might contain the little fruits that, when gathered, can be turned into one of two sprays that either make your Pikmin particularly brutal or temporarily turns your enemies to stone.
Pretty quickly you find yourself completely and utterly absorbed into this kind of thing, and it’ll make entire chunks of hours disappear from under you without you so much as noticing. The new control scheme, with which you point-and-click your way around the maps as if it were a PC strategy title, works fantastically well too, and thankfully you don’t need to do any silly gestures to throw the Pikmin at things and the like as it’s all centred around the buttons. It’s a scheme that is particularly easy to pick up via the brief tutorial section, and once you get the idea you are sorted.
The campaign won’t last forever of course (although there is no day limit as in the first, so it takes a huge chunk of pressure off your shoulders), so it’s lucky that the game also has a pretty enjoyable multiplayer offering on hand to keep you entertained beyond the end of the single player stuff. There are two flavours of multiplayer to tackle, with an adversarial mode in which you compete with a chum and their army to take coloured marbles back to your base (it gets bloody hectic, trust me), or a co-operative offering that, once unlocked, allows you to hook up with a pal for some splitscreen task solving.
Combined with the lovely, colourful visuals and the general absurdity of being little spacemen commanding walking onions in the hunt for everyday rubbish, the above goes a long way to making Pikmin 2 a really wicked little game to get stuck into. What isn’t so great is that at £25 the game is pretty much as it was on the GameCube, and although the new control scheme is awesome the older version still controls perfectly well too, if a little more awkwardly at points. Perhaps at a lower price point it would have been easier to swallow, but as it is it isn’t really low enough to justify buying it if you already own the GameCube version. This is a genuine shame, as it’s a truly inspired idea that provides a fantastically unique experience, and one that for those not owning it already is something that really isn’t to be missed.
Let’s concentrate on the good first, as there really is much to recommend here. Picking up from where the original (excellent, and available on Wii Play) Pikmin left off, Captain Olimar has returned home from his adventures to find that his space haulage company is going bust. Not even having so much time as time go and see his little bobblehead wife or son, he’s packed off with a bumbling cohort called Louie and sent off to a planet – pretty obviously Earth – to collect everyday trash to pay off the debt. There I was thinking I had it tough!
At a very basic level, the idea is that as Olimar and/or Louie you stroll around the little levels you get sent to picking little coloured plants called Pikmin, who will then follow you around and complete various tasks for you such as building bridges, fighting enemies and carrying objects back to your ship. However, Pikmin 2 takes this and adds plenty of new options to the player than the first game, which in turn makes the fact you can divide Olimar and Louie into two separate parties a boon.
Initially, this isn’t really a consideration you have to make as the levels and tasks are smaller and packed in enough for you to be able to all stroll around in one happy clappy group taking things on as you find them. Your little Pikmin come in a variety of colours, with the reds (immune against fire), yellows (protected from electricity) and blues (aquatic) returning once more to be used in the various natural situations you find. Pretty quickly you’ll get the idea that lobbing a group of yellow Pikmin at a fire-breathing monster is a totally naff idea; likewise, sending a group of reds to cross a shallow pond is asking for all sorts of silly bother.
Added into this for the second game are the big fat biffa purple Pikmin, who are effectively ten Pikmin in one little fat dude and are great for wiping out enemies, and the ghostly little white fellas that can withstand poison and sense buried treasure. The catch with these little guys is that they are in finite supply as opposed to the others that can be harvested infinitely, meaning that once you have exhausted all the flowers from which they are produced you are not going to be getting any more. Obviously, this also means that should you run out of either type you are not going to get 100% completion, although the loss of either type won’t mean you can’t pick up enough objects to pay of your 10,000 Pokos debt.
Hence, it turns into a big fat treasure hunt, with you venturing around the various landscapes doing little tasks in order to pick up the various objects you need and carry them back to your ship for payment. With Olimar and crew being approximately 2cm in height everything is thus super sized and even something as innocuous as a stick of lipstick or an upside-down mug needs quite the little troop to carry off, so you’ll need to be gathering the Pikmin tokens as quickly as you can and ferrying them back to each of the basic types’ spaceships in order to grow more and more.
As you delve deeper into the game, it does more and more to separate itself from its predecessor. The most striking change is the introduction of caves, into which you dive with your gathering of Pikmin and pretty much dungeon crawl your way through the various levels as you pick up treasure and tackle tricky end bosses. It works beautifully as a risk-reward dynamic, with the amount of Pikmin in your crew being set the moment you enter the cave and none being available to expand your army as you progress. Balancing up a mixed group of all types is crucial, as you never know what obstacles and tasks you’ll be facing in order to pick up the treasure and hence you really need to put a good deal of thought into things before you go diving in willy-nilly.
Another main change is the introduction of Louie, with control of each commander being switched via tapping the minus button. The further you get into the game the bigger the challenges that face you are, so assigning a couple of types of Pikmin to Olimar and controlling him over one side of the map whilst you take Louie and another bunch the other way to carry out something else becomes somewhat of a godsend. You may, for example, decide that Louie can go west and knock down a poisoned wall with white Pikmin whilst having the purples there to add a bit of muscle should they get into a fight, whilst Olimar might head east and trudge through a pond with a team of blues so he can build a connecting bridge to a patch of land, hence allowing all types of Pikmin to access new areas which perhaps might contain the little fruits that, when gathered, can be turned into one of two sprays that either make your Pikmin particularly brutal or temporarily turns your enemies to stone.
Pretty quickly you find yourself completely and utterly absorbed into this kind of thing, and it’ll make entire chunks of hours disappear from under you without you so much as noticing. The new control scheme, with which you point-and-click your way around the maps as if it were a PC strategy title, works fantastically well too, and thankfully you don’t need to do any silly gestures to throw the Pikmin at things and the like as it’s all centred around the buttons. It’s a scheme that is particularly easy to pick up via the brief tutorial section, and once you get the idea you are sorted.
The campaign won’t last forever of course (although there is no day limit as in the first, so it takes a huge chunk of pressure off your shoulders), so it’s lucky that the game also has a pretty enjoyable multiplayer offering on hand to keep you entertained beyond the end of the single player stuff. There are two flavours of multiplayer to tackle, with an adversarial mode in which you compete with a chum and their army to take coloured marbles back to your base (it gets bloody hectic, trust me), or a co-operative offering that, once unlocked, allows you to hook up with a pal for some splitscreen task solving.
Combined with the lovely, colourful visuals and the general absurdity of being little spacemen commanding walking onions in the hunt for everyday rubbish, the above goes a long way to making Pikmin 2 a really wicked little game to get stuck into. What isn’t so great is that at £25 the game is pretty much as it was on the GameCube, and although the new control scheme is awesome the older version still controls perfectly well too, if a little more awkwardly at points. Perhaps at a lower price point it would have been easier to swallow, but as it is it isn’t really low enough to justify buying it if you already own the GameCube version. This is a genuine shame, as it’s a truly inspired idea that provides a fantastically unique experience, and one that for those not owning it already is something that really isn’t to be missed.
9/10
