Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble (Game Boy Color)

When you include something like an accelerometer in the game cartridge, it’s inevitable your game will be defined by that gimmick. Controlling Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble by tipping the Game Boy Color around to move your character would inevitably shape the experience, but whether or not this was a mere curiosity or a creative twist would come down to how it was designed around. While the presence of Kirby would likely lead players to believe this game would be a cute and accessible experience with perhaps a little bit of hidden depth, Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble was originally an unrelated game about a monkey called Koro Monkey during development before the popular pink puffball took over the title role. The Kirby influence ended up being smaller than one would hope as a result, not just down to recognizable elements such as the ability to absorb enemy powers being entirely absent, but it seems the Kirby series’s creativity and charm is in short supply here as well.

In Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble, Kirby awakes one day to find that the stars in the sky have been stolen by the self-proclaimed king of Dreamland, King Dedede. While this thin story doesn’t attempt to make any justification for it, Kirby elects to chase after the king without using his feet at all, instead rolling up into a ball and heading off to conquer 8 worlds with 4 levels each. Kirby is viewed from a top-down perspective here and his movement is almost entirely controlled by how you move your game system while playing. The A button will sometimes be used to jump out of a hole or interact with specific gimmicks like a level where the A and B buttons make different floor tiles appear, but for the most part you’ll need to tilt your system down when you want Kirby to move forward, pull it back up to send him backwards, and tip it left or right to help him turn and navigate his way around obstacles. While this can be touchy at times and there are definitely moments like the ice levels or thin crossings over large pits that will really make you wish for something more precise, the movement issues are definitely the intentional base of the game’s challenge. Without this movement system the game worlds would be all too easy to cross, so fighting to roll Kirby where you want him to be to avoid enemies and falls is meant to involve some struggle.

A bit less of a good idea though is how Kirby normally jumps. If you want Kirby to leap upwards, you’ll need to move your game system almost like you’re flipping something with a spatula. This leads to some immediate obvious issues though, such as the fact a jump will immediately give you some backwards momentum. You can account for this in how you position some of your jumps, but it also means the game is asking for a specific motion that throws off your ability to control the jump, and there are some moments where adjusting Kirby’s movement after might lead to an annoying brush with peril as the game certainly isn’t shy about throwing around an abundance of instant death pits. Again, one can see this as part of the skill challenge, the player needing to accommodate the risk of a jump, but then there are times when Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble gets a little testy. You are moving your system around a lot to micromanage your movement, so sometimes if you’re a little too zealous in a shift in direction, Kirby will go jumping up into the air. Jumping can actually impact your situation quite a bit at times, it not only a way to harm enemies but also it influences certain helpful items in the area. Panels with stars you collect for extra lives or extra time will swap when you jump and there are bumpers that either bounce you away or bounce you into the air that alternate between those effects after a jump. The panel flipping isn’t too big a problem, but the bumper effects can sometimes catch you off guard, especially if you’re trying to use them to assist your movement and then suddenly everything is inverted thanks to the game misinterpreting your intent.

Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble isn’t really designed for you to ever fully acclimate to its movement to the point it becomes second nature, because if you did, its levels would feel a lot weaker than they already are. Many stages can be surprisingly brisk to complete if you focus only on forward progress, some levels feeling like they barely had a vision for their layout if you don’t roll off onto side paths in search of extra lives. Death is a frequent punishment for slipping up in Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble and some worlds like the clouds definitely lay things out to encourage plenty of lethal falls, but while this is likely to be an incentive to seek out some extra life opportunities and thus stumble across some of the more challenging parts of levels, it also doesn’t feel like the strongest motivation. If you get a Game Over you just need to repeat the current stage, there’s a mid-level checkpoint, and the game isn’t too shy to hand out stars for small actions so you’ll probably rack up some lives without having to take bold risks. There is a level timer that tries to encourage you to be quick to clear a stage which is likely meant to lead to some panicked sloppy rolling that endangers the game’s adorable hero, but it can also raise a question about the dubious value of deviating from the path towards the level exit.

Some of these issues could have been rectified with imaginative uses of the rolling mechanic or creative stage dangers, and to be fair, there is some variety to what you encounter. Cloud platforms you move around by tipping the Game Boy Color, sections where Kirby puffs up to fly through levels and fire air bullets, and a particularly fun halfpipe level near the end of the game that is one of the few moments the game attempts to add some real elevation and three-dimensionality to the areas you roll through. There are a few different tools like jumps you activate with a button press that are sometimes chained together in an interesting way, and there’s at least some setting diversity although that does lead to some of the simpler ideas. Levels with water often have you needing to escape it if you roll into it which can lead to repetitive setbacks, many stages feature a set of switches you need to roll over quickly or they’ll reset that often just feels like something that happens in a matter of time rather than once your dexterity is solid, and the bosses in particular are frequently rehashed.

Enemies in Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble aren’t often the main obstacle of interest in the first place, some like the Blockbot robots are more like moving bumpers while the Booler ghosts who can’t be attacked are probably one of the few you might really need to worry about touching, but your generous health can make them a little toothless too. The bosses though can at least strain your health bar and their arenas often have deadly falls, but outside of the final fight with King Dedede, you only ever face variations on the cycloptic ball Orbservor and the cycloptic cloud Kracko. With five Orbservor battles in total it feels particularly egregious, especially since what sets these fights about is mostly the arena being changed a bit while the Orbservor is made a bit more aggressive.

With the terrain already being the main danger it does leave much of Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble feeling pretty similar unless there’s an area specific gimmick on show, but there is an attempt at extra depth in the form of Blue and Red Stars. Blue Stars earn you a chance to play a minigame for extra lives, all of them involving the motion controls in some form. A hurdle race against King Dedede feels like an actually pretty decent use of the jump since you only need to worry about the jump while the running’s covered by pressing A, a balloon shooting game feels like it’s testing your dexterity, and Kirby’s Chicken Race has you wind up a car and try to go as far as you can without going right over the cliff. The extra life prizes and a high score board give these some value, but the Do the Kirby dance game can drag if you’re good at memorizing a slowly evolving Simon pattern and Kirby’s Roll-O-Rama has you trying to guide multiple Kirbys to little holes but they can roll back out and the game expects a lot more precision than usual for this sub-game. You can pick which one to play though, so you can just choose the ones of interest rather than worrying about the rougher ones.

The Red Stars though are meant to give you a collectible to go for in each level, but how they’re hidden makes them an aggravating secondary goal should you pursue it. Red Stars will usually be hidden in side paths, but some of them expect some inexplicable logic to find, to the point that certain stages you’ll need to scour because the Red Star will be invisible and sometimes even positioned in an unassuming alcove. Sometimes the presence of an odd area or the absence of something of note in an area will clue you in a hidden star is nearby, but at other times it will positioned in such a way that it feels like the only way you could find it is exhausting all other options. There are times though when instead it requires utilizing an unusual ability Kirby has where he can either use multiple jump spots or bounce against red bumpers enough times in short successions to briefly turn invincible. This lets Kirby roll right through bumpers and is the only way to reach certain areas, many Red Stars asking for use of this. Bumpers can throw you in odd directions if you’re not lined up nicely and the invincibility is often short-lived, but worst of all, sometimes you might see a blocked Red Star path only after you’ve passed by the bumpers or jumps you could use to become invincible. Unless you die you might not be able to try those jumps again, and even if you do it can be a single chance per life. What makes the Red Star quest less inviting than even all that though is it only matters if you grab them all, you lose a level’s Red Star if you die before completing the stage after you grabbed it, and the reward is just a hard mode for a game that can already feel pretty tedious without more tricks to make it even rougher to play.

THE VERDICT: The cute face of Kirby and some adorable voice lines might tempt you to be gentle with how you estimate Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble, but the motion sensor gameplay that is meant to be the game’s core challenge doesn’t rub up against many creative ideas while also being hampered by detection issues. You’ll head to areas with new mechanics like water and flight but for most the adventure the focus still feels like it’s about trying not to roll off the stage, and with multiple repeated bosses you really start to feel like there wasn’t a lot of thought put into what Kirby will be doing beyond the standard traversal challenges. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble doesn’t really want you to get used to its movement because then it would become clearer how simple many stages are, especially if you don’t pursue the often weak rewards or obtuse hidden Red Stars that are meant to encourage you to do more than quickly roll to a level’s end.

And so, I give Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble for Game Boy Color…

A BAD rating. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble’s development likely lead to this game being of a much lower quality than you’d usually expect from a game set in this usually approachable and colorful game series. It’s not so much that Kirby was added later in development, Kirby’s Epic Yarn came out wonderful despite undergoing a similar change. Perhaps the blame should fall at director Toshiaki Suzuki’s feet, and considering his credits are usually remakes, atypical software like digital dictionaries, and he’d go on to direct other gimmick-focused experiences like Face Raiders on 3DS, it might just be that the guy in charge doesn’t really think too deeply about a game outside of the big picture elements. Rolling around in Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble is a challenge and level layouts are often first and foremost meant to see if you can move about correctly, but they also usually only push against it with frustrating methods like instant death falls or their introduced mechanics don’t have the substance needed to really draw out meaningful shifts in how you approach the stage. The halfpipe level is a good example of the game doing something right though, since you have to start focusing on things like building up speed, accounting for where Kirby will roll as he comes down, and enemies pack more oomph as you can’t so easily roll around them. Of course, the motion detection being imprecise at times feels like it’s an inevitable issue with the hardware, and precision would undermine almost every level so you almost can’t just fix up the accelerometer and say the game will be a clean play after.

If Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble came out instead as Koro Monkey, history would probably have moved on and left it as a weird forgotten piece of Nintendo history. Put a recognizable and beloved character front and center though, and people are going to be a bit kinder to it, but considering how supposedly it was almost retooled into a Pokémon game for its American release, it does help demonstrate that it’s only a Kirby game in appearance only. It lacks the franchise’s usual creative spark and personality, a few recognizable creatures wandering around but it’s hardly enough to make up for its unproductive devotion to its controls being the heart of almost every activity. With some more imagination perhaps it could better nestle in next to your average Kirby game, but with only a mild degree of surface level charms, Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble ends up with little else on show to draw you in and keep you playing until you’ve saved the stars over Dreamland.