I finally got round to playing the demo of Pikmin 4, which is coming out on 21 July. It’s pretty good (and quite extensive). I’m still not sold on the addition of the dog sidekick Oatchi - the levelling up seems gimmicky (and not as interesting as it was in Overlord, at least based on what they’ve shown os far) and makes me worry that there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on combat later in the game. But it does open up some new puzzle mechanics, most notably with the addition of jumping (sorry Tinykin, they stole your thing!), but also by allowing you to split up your team (not new to the series, but this time Oatchi and your character have different abilities/constraints). They also seem to be being quite generous on the difficulty, including a sort of checkpoint system, which may mitigate my combat concerns. So I’m definitely looking forward to the full release.
Do they still have any kind of PVP like in Pikmin 3? My kid and I used to play PVP all the time and it was very fun…hoping they have that in this version also.
They showed it in the trailer but I have zero interest in it so didn’t pay much attention.
Yeah, my girlfriend and I had a lot of fun PvP on Pikmin 2 on the GameCube. I think I enjoyed it more than the single-player stuff to be honest which just never really grabbed me unfortunately.
This explains the game very well to a newcomer to the series like me.
Looks very similar to Tinykin, but with combat, and unlike Tinykin, your Pikmin can die.
Yes, that’s exactly it. Tinykin basically took the Pikmin formula, removed combat/death and the day timer, and added jumping, which Pikmin 4 has but not at all to the same extent. The jumping in Pikmin 4 is less about platforming and more about gating progress until you can get Oatchi into position.
I made the mistake of convincing my son to try the demo last week. So once he finally realized that it’s like Tinykin, he couldn’t get enough of it. We finished the demo and since it wouldn’t let us keep playing, he started over with a second save slot, and finished, and yesterday we finished in the third and final save slot. I’ve pre-ordered the game, but man, it’s going to be a long 8 days between now and then.
We already have 80+ hours in Tinykin, which we’ve started over twice, so we’ve already gone back to that well too many times already. Come on July 21st. Get here faster!
You could always play Pikmins 1-3 in the meantime. Or the Overlord games.
Eurogamer’s first 5-star review under their new review score policy.
I’ve been telling my son exactly how many days are left until he can stop playing the demo and play the full game. But now he’s leaving the country on Thursday, visiting his grandparent for a month.
I’ve been letting him down easy last few days, slipping “visiting grandfather” into the countdown before Pikmin 4 day. But I think yesterday it finally hit him that he won’t be here. And then it hit him that I won’t be with him on his trip.
I suppose I’ll wait until he comes back and start the game with him in the last week of August.
Played an hour last night. Mostly the tutorial…there are kind of like 2 of them…it’s somewhat annoying to us vets…but I’m now in the first open area and can run around and work on exploring. I like the dog, wasnt sure if I would but he’s useful and always nice to have another way to solve puzzles. Told my kid that after you finish the game, there are super hard challenges and he is NOT about that but I cant wait! Going to be a fun weekend.
About 20 days in now, though I’ve not got very far as I’m mostly trying to 100% each area as I do them. I’m enjoying it a lot, but I have to say I’m not a huge fan of the grab-bag of mini-games approach it’s taking with the dandori battles and night missions and so on. It’s not clear how essential those are, though, so maybe I’m overthinking it and should just power on with the story stuff.
My son has been back in town since last Thursday, so we’ve been easing into Pikmin 4. We continued his demo game where he was on Day 43 (we had discovered the secret to the demo was that you could keep playing forever as long as you didn’t collect 1500 worth of treasure, so we just avoided collecting treasure as much as we could).
I do enjoy how the game is sort of easing me into more of a RTS mindset the further we go (we’re in the third big area now). But as baby’s first RTS, it is still too much for my 6 year old to handle, so he gets scared when attacked by things and hands me the controller. If he doesn’t hand it to me in time though, he gets most of his Pikmin killed and then I’m thinking, what am I supposed to do with this? How am I going to salvage this now? The game can be quite harsh if you lose a lot of Pikmin. Especially in night battles and dandori battles.
@Rock8man You can rewind time. Hit the minus button, it’s on the menu. It’s good for exactly that kind of situation. (Maybe not in night or dandori battles, not sure. But those are pretty short and not that bad to re-do if you have to).
Anyway, I finished it; or, at least, I got to the end credits. There is more to do afterwards. Took me around 32 days, I think? I kinda got stuck in the last area, spent a few days not making much progress before I figured out the thing I’d missed.
I definitely enjoyed it, but… it is not super challenging. It gives you a lot of tools (gear upgrades, items, dog upgrades, lots of types of pikmin…) but for the most part you don’t need any of them. I’m hoping the end game content has some more difficult stuff to do.
It does, including something more akin to Pikmin 1 regarding time pressure.
There’s quite a bit more content after the credit roll. And it’s not filler. Excellent game. Probably the best Pikmin game yet.
I was bored to tears after about an hour playing this…way too easy. Maybe need to keep playing to the end and try the harder experience. I loved P3 but this just seemed way too easy. The dog is cool though.
The first hour is still well within the tutorial. Admittedly, the pre-credits game is definitely on the easy side for a Pikmin game, but there are loads of optional challenges if you want to push yourself even before the endgame.
Last night we “finished” the game and got the credits to roll. Day 144, 97 hours. But luckily it wasn’t the end! Phew. So glad it was a fake out.
One thing I wish the game had was shorter words. My son is currently learning to read CVC words in school as he learns to read. Consonant-vowel-consonant. But all the words in Pikmin 4’s dialogue are freaking long and complex words, so he tends to skip past them in frustration.
My frustration with Pikmin 4 is that there are far too many words. The game is very good but it doesn’t know when to shut up.
Yeah, it’s a lot of words. I don’t blame my son for skipping through more than half the dialog.