It won't be until mid-May when the king of suck hits the 3DS, and yet, scores for Kirby: Triple Deluxe have already started dropping. It seems like the sort of game slaps on the kid gloves, ensuring that most players won't have a problem breezing right on through, and the level design takes enough of an advantage of the 3DS's motion control capabilities to keep things from getting too stale. Read on below...
Gamespot, 8/10 - "...as inventive as platformers come, unashamedly making use of just about every piece of 3D trickery around to craft some wildly unique, colorful, and thoroughly masterful levels. More impressive is how Triple Deluxe makes such trickery seem absolutely effortless: there are some very clever moments here, but they never come at the expense of solid platforming. It helps that you're introduced to Triple Deluxe's 3D charms gradually. Early levels are standard Kirby fare, where you leap around smashing star boxes and generally making life miserable for your enemies by swallowing them whole and spitting them out again at their buddies. Things happening in the background offer hints at what's to come--you see monsters taking a stroll, some star boxes to smash--but these things are kept tantalizingly out of reach for the moment...New ideas and challenges fly in thick and fast, but are so well implemented that they rarely overwhelm you. One moment you're using the 3DS's motion controls to blast a rocket at a distant set of otherwise insurmountable blocks and using a star to travel to the background and grab some goodies, and the next, you're traversing a ghost world, where the enemies and platforms only appear on a mirror image in the background...This is one of the few 3DS games that really makes use of the handheld's 3D screen. You can play with the 3D off, with shadows and blurring helping to define what is and isn't in the foreground, but having the 3D on helps massively in navigating the intricate levels and gives an amusing squashed Kirby some visual pop...Triple Deluxe is an absolute diamond of a game, and cements Kirby's place as nothing less than a bone fide platforming superstar."
Polygon, 7.5/10 - "Kirby: Triple Deluxe starts with the same kid gloves. It opens with easy, pastel-colored stages that seem suited to younger or more inexperienced players. But Kirby: Triple Deluxedidn't take long to reveal its true nature. It's an intelligent, sassy little platformer that isn't afraid to change things up. The story is bare-bones, but all you need to know is that it's your job to control Kirby, the titular pink puffball, through dozens of 2D platforming stages. It suits the fanciful style of the game...The challenge in Triple Deluxe comes mainly from choosing the right power to suit the job at hand. Much of the fun comes from figuring out what outlandish thing the game wants you to do - whether it's to eat a creature to steal his weapon, defeat a motorcycle mini boss with acrobatic flips, or suck pieces of scenery up to rearrange the stage. The anything-goes attitude also comes through inTriple Deluxe's level design. From the beginning, the game's stages have an emphasis on the interplay between foreground and background elements. This starts very simply - I'd hit a switch in the foreground to make a bridge appear in the background, then warp over to that plane and move on. But these elements got trickier - and smarter - as Kirby: Triple Deluxe went on...The biggest addition to Kirby: Triple Deluxe is the hypernova power, which gives Kirby a black hole-like ability to suck up massive quantities of enemies, objects and even scenery. Early on, the game had me eating giant trees that were in my way, or hoovering swarms of enemies. It was visually interesting, but the first few instances of hypernova had me worried that the new ability was just a gimmick, as the power shows up only in prescribed circumstances. To my delight, it ended up being a feature that constantly saw new and creative uses throughout the game...When I started the game up, I was worried about Kirby: Triple Deluxe. The first world felt too easy, too 'me-too.' I thought the hypernova power was going to be a tired gimmick, tacked on to a standard platformer. But Kirby: Triple Deluxe really warmed up after the first world or so, with levels that had me warping between planes and making clever use of Kirby's ever-expanding arsenal. Kirby: Triple Deluxe isn't the prettiest Kirby game - but it's the smartest."
Nintendo Life, 7/10 - "for a mascot often attached to experimental gameplay, Kirby Triple Deluxe is conservative in its construction and seldom veers far from its comfort zone. Triple Deluxe’s trident pokes in three ways with varying force. Story Mode is the clear star here, but the two extra games — Kirby Fighters and Dedede’s Drum Dash — are each strong enough to stand as an eShop download. Story Mode is a platforming jaunt cut from the same mischievous cloth as Kirby’s side-scrolling adventures have been since 1992...Story Mode does little flashy in the way of mechanics, with its big gimmick being the lack of big gimmicks. Sure, there are some novel elements, but they come off as rather pointless and worn — tilting the 3DS to move a cart is no shocker, and is in fact a mechanic that Kirby himself built an entire game around years ago. Jumping between the foreground and background to solve puzzles and fight enemies is an organic extension of — and, dare we say, required justification for — the 3DS’s auto-stereoscopic display, but brings nothing of grandeur to the table...That leaves the new Hypernova ability, force-fed to Kirby at curiously opportune times, which paints him a neat rainbow chrome and allows him to inhale or influence creatures and objects of a screen-filling size. There’s a nice friction associated with going Hypernova as Kirby then has the ability to rip up the world in a way never really possible. The “puzzles” that use it only have the one solution, though, and the ability only appears when required. There’s no rushing around all Hypernova-like just for kicks, so it loses some of its luster as the game progresses. Floralia’s six floating islands don’t initially pose much of a challenge, offering a relaxing — if simplistic — platformer filled with foes and abilities both new and old to the franchise to breeze through....Kirby Triple Deluxe is a pleasant package that doesn’t push the envelope very far. The Story Mode is an elegant but conservative adventure that trades too greatly in familiarity and simplicity, the same type of neo-nostalgia that Nintendo has seen success with on the Mario side of things: it’s sure to scratch that Kirby itch — or create one for new players — but fails to move the franchise forward in any meaningful direction. However, the rest of the package holds its own quite well: Kirby Fighters is a great time-sink sure to provoke new rivalries among friends, and the post-game content offers a second competitive wind to the adventure. Come for the cute platforming, stay for the battle royale."
IGN, 6/10 - "Kirby Triple Deluxe suffers from the same fundamental problem most standard Kirby platformers have in the past: With so many powers and abilities at his disposal, breezing through its levels becomes incredibly easy for most of the game. It just gets boring. Despite some expanded ideas, neat graphics and music, and a few fun boss fights, there aren’t a whole lot of reasons for anybody older than 12 to pick this one up. Playing as Kirby is kind of like playing as Superman foiling common bank robbers: he’s practically unstoppable. He can swap between 26 useful and diverse abilities by copying them from his foes...Mini-bosses step in and attempt to add a tougher challenge, but adding more hitpoints doesn’t really matter if they can’t really hurt you. The only times I died were when I got lazy and fell down a pit...Kirby Triple Deluxe may look great and has some clever ideas for how to use 3D, but falls into a rut of simple platforming and puzzles that rarely require any thought or skill. I admire that it tries to give us more powers and abilities to play with than ever before, but that empowerment shouldn’t come at the expense of any real difficulty."
