Pikmin 4 in the test: The Switch can”t play strategy games? No way!

With our mini rescue dog and a horde of colourful fleas on our backs, we puzzle and fight our way through children”s rooms, front gardens and deep caves. It”s Pikmin time again!

Light blue freezes water and enemies, pink can fly, yellow is immune to electricity: If you”re nodding knowingly now, you”ve probably played one of the previous Pikmin titles. Because the colourful “aliens” have been scurrying across Nintendo”s platforms since 2001, it”s also a time travel through console history – Gamecube, DS, Wii and the hapless Wii U served as the playground.

On the Switch, Pikmin 3 Deluxe appeared in 2020 as a port from the Wii U, but the remake of the game, which was already seven years old at the time, didn”t take advantage of the handheld TV hybrid”s capabilities. The imprecise controls and muddy textures were the main points of criticism. Now Nintendo has developed Pikmin 4 exclusively for the Switch – and really well.

Many colourful Smarties

The fun gameplay of Pikmin 4 is not much different from its predecessors. You control a tiny astronaut who has crashed himself on an alien planet while on a rescue mission. A planet that looks strikingly like our Earth. Your job: save the rescue crew!

So you gallop on your faithful dog Ochin through rooms, a garden, park, beach and other locations to pick up scattered crew members and civilian missing persons. In the process, you directly encounter the strange Pikmin, half animal, half plant, who join you.

The smart little guys are so industrious that even ants seem like bratty teenagers on a compulsory school hiking day. Because your Pikmin remove obstacles, build bridges and climbing walls, fight insects, crabs, birds and other creatures, and drag the corpses right back to your outpost.

(In night missions you have to defend light buildings (left) against monster waves. This is helped by the new green glow pikmin, which blind enemies briefly with a kind of flashbang).

As you progress through the campaign, you will come across more and more Pikmin species, each with their own abilities. The red ones are strong in battle and immune to fire, light blue ones freeze waters so that even their non-swimmer colleagues can cross them, black ones break down ice barriers, and so on.

There are now nine different types in total. The great attraction of Pikmin 4 is to cleverly use your colourful Smarties troop to solve tasks: A “treasure” is waiting high up on a garden table? Then throw your yellow Pikmin up, because you can hurl them further than anyone else.

A cave is pitch black? Then take the new light-up Pikmin with you – they will then act as a living torch and supplement your own headlamp.

(Outpost on the beach: Our Pikmin are hauling a Statue of Liberty treasure to the Beagle (right) for recycling. On the left is our (troop carrier) Onion, we can change Pikmin types here).

Cuddly attack dog

Ochin, your companion, is also a jack-of-all-trades. He serves your astronaut character and the Pikmin not only as a clumsy taxi, but also as a battering ram, for example, to knock down enemies or smash clay jars to open up passages behind them.

You can also switch between Otschin and yourself, then steer the dog through dangerous pipes, for example, or squeeze through barriers and catch up with the dog later.

The cool thing about it is that you always teach Otschin new skills: Jumping, swimming and stronger attacks are still purely athletic, but later he becomes a sort of casual Lassie.

For example, he searches for lost crew members on your command or for Pikmin that are still stuck in the ground and want to be picked.

(Two player duel in split screen: We play on the same Switch, whoever has the most points after five minutes wins. Here, our Pikmin are currently dragging a (nasty bomb) into the enemy base.)

Better wayfinding and control

To fix your crashed spaceship, you need glitterium. To do this, you”ll have to salvage “treasures”, such as toys lying around in the open, half-buried garden tools or, of course, various Nintendo handhelds and modules.

Here, too, Otschin helps you with the search and transport. But the main job is done by the cute Pikmin. Like groups of ants, they also shoulder “huge” salvaged objects and haul them to your outpost with rhythmic cheers.

(Our main base with the stranded rescue ship Shepherd. The more crew members we recover during expeditions, the more options we unlock, such as items from scientists.)

The wayfinding is much better now than in some predecessors. And if some Pikmin are left behind without work, collecting them is much easier than in Minecraft Legends. You can even have Okin automatically rescue them later in the game or call them to you with a horn item.

The controls are also much more precise than in the Wii U port of Pikmin 3 on the Switch, and even in hectic boss fights you can throw the appropriate Pikmin at specific weak point body parts – but we”ll get to that in a moment.

The Beagle has landed

Your stranded spaceship Shepherd is your main base camp. From here you fly to daily expeditions with the flight pod Beagle and a kind of onion on three legs to the front garden, park and so on.

The Beagle then serves as an outpost, where you haul your treasures and raw materials. The latter is used, among other things, as a universal building material for bridges, which you can build at predetermined points to reach new sections.

The three-legged onion is your troop transporter, so to speak. Here you exchange Pikmin of different colours, for example, because you can only take a certain number of different colours with you at any one time.

The onion also gets bigger as the game progresses, the more onion parts you find. Then it takes on more Pikmin, until you end up running around with several dozen – when they bounce on Ochin, he resembles a Mettigel full of colourful salt sticks.

Night missions with new Pikmin art

But beware: the clock is ticking on expeditions, and you”ll need to be back at the Beagle by sunset to fly back to the Shepherd – because it”s too dangerous out there at night. Nastily, Pikmin who didn”t make it to the Beagle in time are left behind and surrounded by enemies in an ingame sequence.

However, after about 15 to 20 hours of play, there are also optional night expeditions. In these, you have to defend buildings that contain valuable glow juice and are attacked by ever stronger waves of monsters.

To do this, you use the new glow pikmin: If you collect them and bundle them up and send them at the attackers, they form a large green glow ball that blinds the aggressors – then they are easy victims for the glow pikmin and Okin. These night battles are excitingly made and pleasantly hectic!

More comfort and back

Pikmin 4 manages the feat of introducing a new gameplay element just when we”ve used the previous ones extensively and are getting loosely annoyed or bored.

Two examples: Initially, you can only throw your Pikmin one at a time. To retrieve a larger treasure, you have to throw 15 or more Pikmin at it, i.e. press the A button 15 times – this gets annoying at some point, especially as each Pikmin squeals loudly.

But when the constant squealing almost drove us crazy, the new collect command was added: With this, we send all Pikmin of one colour to the target, which also makes fights easier.

(Our Pikmin build a bridge from raw material. We use the radar item to call more Pikmin to us. Our Beagle hovers in the background on the left.)

Second example, we”ll stay with the 15-Pikmin treasure for a moment: If we throw down too many Pikmin, some will be left unemployed. If we don”t notice this and arrive at the Beagle just before sunset, it”s too late to get them quickly, and those left behind will be fre… you know.

But then, as if the Switch heard our swearing, two handy inventions were unlocked. With the homecoming signal, we call all Pikmin back to base, and with the inactivity alarm, we call all the unemployed back to us.

Other improvements such as the navigation system with autopilot are also practical: mark the destination on the expedition map and we automatically run or ride there.

(The cave levels are small, very dark and usually finished in a few minutes per floor. But be careful that no Pikmin fall over the edge!)

Then we let Ochin ram the block and the team member tumbles down. A little later a similar puzzle, the solution right next to it: A stick lies next to the block, we send Pikmin to it, which raise the stick and use it as a climbing pole.

Often it”s just a matter of using the right Pikmin: A power fence is blocking the way?

Then we throw yellow Pikmin at it – all the others would be sizzled. But even then, the game warns us immediately, and we can collect the shocked little guy, no harm done! A lava field is glowing in front of us? Then we”ll send red Pikmin forward to extinguish it!

Who”s eating the boss?

The boss fights, often dramatically announced, are also simple. Most of the time, it”s enough to throw a horde of Pikmin at body weak points and whistle them back (literally, with a whistle) in time for the counterattack.

A well-timed ramming attack with Oschin helps, but is often not even necessary. In part, the first boss fights are even harder than the later ones because we can only use a few, weaker Pikmin. The Shepherd scientist invents bonuses like fire resistance or electric shock resistance, but we didn”t even need those either.

Equally unnecessary, but funny, are disposable items like throwing sticky bombs or bitter carrots that briefly paralyse enemies after eating them. Those who want (somewhat) more challenging battles, however, are better off with Minecraft Legends.

(Light blue Pikmin (left) also freeze waters. The crosshairs in the middle are from our co-op player, who speeds up transport by shooting the cube treasures)

But even if the battles aren”t challenging, they”re fun: seemingly harmless piles of leaves become a plague of camouflage beetles, an anteater simply sucks in Pikmin, and a pufferfish-like, transparent boss swallows Ochin and dozens of Pikmin, which then visibly float around in its belly.

At the beach scene, an enemy rolls boulders towards us from above as if on a sandcastle ball track, while we fight our way uphill to him. There”s also high and low tide on the beach: just in time for High Noon, the water level drops and makes areas previously only accessible to swimming blue Pikmin accessible.

Upside down, downside up

The landscapes have become fancier than in the ported predecessor. For example, when we stand on a sand hill in the beach level, we can see our base far below in the background, and watch the Pikmin who are carrying treasures there.

On the beach, there is also a tide change just in time for midday, when the water level drops and makes areas previously only accessible to swimming blue Pikmin accessible.

The underground caves, however, are dull in comparison, because beyond the walkable corridors and rooms, almost everything is gloomy. The different floors of a cave are also smaller and more linear – despite the higher boss density, you”ll usually be through them in a few minutes.

By the way, in the underground the countdown continues until sunset, so there”s no time pressure down here.

Simplified Co-op

The co-op mode for two players on the same Switch has been slimmed down, though. You can still play the campaign together, but only the main player controls his character. The second player only shoots at enemies with a slingshot.

He can also use it to shoot bombs that paralyse carrots, or to propel his own Pikmin by shooting at their dragged object. This is nice at first, but boring and above all exhausting in the long run.

Funnier and more exciting are the duels, in which both players have a base and some Pikmin in split screen and have to drag as many treasures and killed enemies as possible to their own base within, for example, five minutes.

Occasionally, a “creep” will appear: If your Pikmin drag it into the enemy base, the thing explodes and your opponent loses points drastically. This duel mode is also played more often in the solo campaign, then against AI opponents.

The races are exciting, but sometimes chaotic, as it is difficult to tell your own and other Pikmin apart because of their similar colours, and the split screen naturally restricts the overview. Nevertheless, the duels are fast-paced and challenging, because the AI opponent is a good sparring partner.

Editor”s verdict

Pikmin 4 is one of those pleasantly relaxing games that I fire up for a good hour before bedtime – okay, sometimes it”s suddenly two. Because the adventures with the scampering little guys and rescue dog Ochin are played at a nice pace, without getting stressful or too obsessive.

There are always new sections to discover in the chic landscapes and fun, albeit simple, boss fights in the less chic caves. What I like most is that there are always new elements and possibilities.

The glass barrier from before is no longer a problem as soon as I approach with black Pikmin. And in the lab I always get new gadgets that make my life as a crashed mini-rescue astronaut easier. Even though I don”t need many of them, especially the various types of bombs cause a lot of damage joy.

However, I wouldn”t play Pikmin 4 for a whole evening or even a weekend at a stretch. Many sequences are repetitive (throw X Pikmin with colour Y at object Z), and the difficulty level fluctuates between shallow and mediocre. That”s why I”ve set myself a personal goal: don”t lose any Pikmin!

Because then it gets more difficult, because even a falling enemy can send Pikmin to the eternal hunting grounds – then their souls float up to heaven, just like in the days of the Settlers. If you have children of the right age, be sure to try out the fun duel mode for two players!

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