Kirby and the Forgotten Land demo out now: Here are our thoughts so far

The demo for Kirby and the Forgotten Land is out now, and it is honestly exactly what I wanted. The free demo, available on the EShop store, gives you a big sample of how the game looks and feels.

You’ll get to experience three stages including the first boss, the ability to try several of the abilities, the option to get a feel for co-op and surprising unlockable extras! It also reveals that every stage has extra objectives to complete to inspire exploration. I love that.

The demo gives you a solid taste of the beginning of the story which goes about as story heavy as a Kirby game is going to give you. Kirby’s wondering around his home turf when a strange portal opens and pulls everything into it including Kirby. It flings him onto the shores of a strange new land straight out of The Last of Us, only with Kirby blocks and enemies that came through the portal scattered all over the place.

One thing I was pleased with though is that I thought they were going to water down Kirby’s abilities for this game to make it more traditional of a 3D platformer and they absolutely did not. Kirby can still float. Now, he can’t fly anymore, which is a massive bummer, but in fairness, all challenge would be gone from this game. So I can see how they’d nerf that.

The abilities are also really fun. They did water them down a bit from Star Allies. One of the best things about Star Allies is when you got an ability you unlocked enough special moves to make a Street Fighter character blush. But here it’s pretty basic.

Luckily on a three dimensional plane against enemies it’s fun though.

Also, a cool thing the demo let’s you do after you beat it is to go back in and play through it with all the abilities involved. Now instead of a regular sword, you get a massive weapon. Instead of simple ice breath, you’re now creating snowmen which can slider around and freeze things. Instead of throwing a cutter, you’re now throwing a hand full of chakrams. One of my favorites though is the bomb ability. When you upgrade that you get these weird electro bombs that, when placed near each other, can form a chain. The more bombs you chain the bigger the explosion and the more damage it causes.

It also let you try several different Mouthful Mode forms. I got to drive around as the car and bust through walls and what not. The vending machine mode let me fire cans of soda like a grenade launcher. I could even absorb a storage tower only so I could open it up and reveal the item inside. One pleasant surprise was the cone form. I thought absolutely nothing of Kirby absorbing a traffic cone when I saw it in the trailer, but it’s actually a really fun mode that allows for stomping attacks and cute little things like ground breaking.

All in all though, the game seems like it’s going to be a blast. It has a lot of charm and personality. The enemies and locations look great with a solid mix of old and new. And the set pieces really liven things up. Especially this moment where I met the first boss a lot sooner than I thought I would and it jumped scared the living hell out of me.

All in all though this game is showing all the signs of being an incredibly fun platformer and I can not wait to snag it when it comes out later this month.

Also, make sure you beat the demo AND do all the optional side things to get access to two different codes that you can put in the full version to unlock extra things!