It's amazing how game companies can get us interested in gardening…
Nintendo may not be known for their strategy titles, but I've always enjoyed me some Pikmin. And thankfully—finally—a new Pikmin game is seeing the light of day. Huzzah! More cute and cuddly plant life to throw mercilessly into the jaws of a massive bug-plant-beast things! How glorious!
For the Wii U, Nintendo's giving us Pikmin 3, the action/strategy game that features that short, rotund little man in a spacesuit named Olimar who's crash-landed on a planet filled with lemming-ish plant life and massive monsters. This time around there are some new Pikmin types, like the Rock and Flying types, with specific special skills—the Flying ones can go over some barriers while the Rock ones are resistant to getting beat up by brute force—to go along with the more standard yellow, red and blue.
The enemies in the demo were all familiar, so it looks like this has been approached with a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. But with how unique Pikmin is in the grand Nintendo lineup—and that we haven't seen a "new" entry in the series since '04—this looks like a damn fun time.
Multiplayer isn't new to Pikmin, but it looks to have been expanded here with a co-op high-scoring campaign, five big worlds to explore and scour for parts in, and something called a "Bingo Battle" for two-player competitive play. I didn't get to use (nor did I see anyone else using) the Wii U tablet, so it's unclear just how it will work. It might be as easy as showing a map of the world or planting Pikmin in certain areas for a faster route through the world, but in time we'll know.
Nintendo's round little space man will land in the US on August 4th and internationally in mid-July.
