Parent's Guide: Kirby's Blowout Blast - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Kirby's Blowout Blast?

Kirby's Blowout Blast is a fast-paced, coin-collecting, enemy-blasting downloadable spin-off from the main Kirby series of platform games. A miniature downloadable adventure available exclusively from the Nintendo eShop, it's very much like a candy-coloured, Kirby-inspired shooting range, where you run through the short levels taking out all the enemies in sight for maximum points. There's no real story or missions to complete here - just a quick-fire selection of courses to race through.

How do you play Kirby's Blowout Blast?

Each level is laid out like an obstacle course of sorts, with platforms, gaps and other such pitfalls scattered around, along with plenty of enemies to defeat and coins to pick up along the way. Without his trademark absorb ability, which let him steal the powers of any enemies he gobbled up, Kirby now has to rely on the much more low-tech strategy of inhaling enemies and spitting them back out at other enemies as a deadly projectile. The more enemies you can inhale in one go, the more powerful the resulting projectile will be, letting you in turn known out more enemies for bonus points.

The whole game is built around this mechanic of inhaling/exhaling, sometimes requiring you to inhale big groups of enemies to fire them at another big group of enemies, or swallowing whatever a boss monster conveniently drops before spitting it back out at them to chip away at their health. Every course in Blowout Blast has four bonus medals you can earn, all of which help contribute to your overall score - taking no damage from enemies, clearing the level within a certain time, collecting all coins and defeating all enemies. By getting at least a gold on each level, you'll unlock extra, more challenging levels and worlds to take on - so it's well worth replaying levels to try and get a better score too.

How easy is Kirby's Blowout Blast to pick up and play?

Like most of the pink puffball's games, Kirby's Blowout Blast is a pretty straightforward little title that shouldn't cause anyone too much trouble. Controls are simple, as Kirby has little beyond a jump and the ability to inhale/exhale in his arsenal, and most enemies (with the exception of bosses) can be defeated in a single hit. In most levels, there's an optimum way of inhaling and exhaling enemies for maximum points - although you certainly don't have to have a perfect run to be able to move on to the next level either. One particular enemy likes to hide amongst the regular enemies and take you by surprise - he looks like a bright orange space hopper until you try to suck them up, at which point they turn into a bitey grey ball of doom, chasing you down and likely chomping off a chunk of your health (fortunately health pickups are plentiful too). Sometimes it's not especially obvious how you should be defeating a particular boss, although once you realise the blocks Lololo pushes, or the stars Kracko the storm cloud drops can be sucked up and fired back, you shouldn't have any issues.

Reading is largely non-existent too, limited to the initial tutorial segments explaining the controls - which are pretty intuitive anyway - so even non-readers should be OK here.

Sample Sentences:

• "Hop on the Warp Star to start!"
• "Defeat enemies in 3D stages and go for the high score!"
• "Inhale multiple enemies to create a Blaster Bullet that'll knock out more [enemies] and up the score!"

Like most Kirby games - or indeed Nintendo games in general - Kirby's Blowout Blast is as tame and inoffensive as it's brightly-coloured and cutesy exterior suggests. There's no bad language, no blood and gore and no sex scenes whatsoever, and the only violence you'll come across is Kirby inhaling and exhaling enemies (mostly cartoon animals, coloured blobs and rain clouds), which simply disappear in a puff of smoke when the projectile connects.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS