Unexpectedly for a game about being a squat little extraterrestrial on an alien planet, Pikmin 3

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It’s this familiarity that makes Pikmin 3 emotionally relatable, and causes the ostensibly disposable pikmin themselves to feel like more than just units on the field. Their little squeaks and dying sighs made me feel guilty when I sent them to their demise by literally throwing them into battle, like I’d let them down. If you fail to round any of the wee guys up at the end of the day before the sun sets, you have to watch them getting munched by nocturnal predators as they make a desperate run for your departing ship, which made me feel like the worst person in the world. Nostalgic, evocative, and clever, Pikmin 3 is a delight while it lasts, blending strategic thinking, exploration, and life-or-death struggles against alien creatures – but it left me eager for more (and fearful of another nine-year wait between games).

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Your interdependency with these cheerfully subservient little plant people is the emotional core of the series. Without food your explorers can't survive the next day, so pikmin carry fruits that you discover back to the craft for analysis, where salivation-inducing waterfalls of juice are squeezed from your spoils. When supplies are low there's a sense of urgency that enlivens the day's exploration. It’s at once frenetic and strategic, a second-to-second action game that demands foresight, caution, and a certain spatial agility that develops as you play, keeping map layouts, potential threats and different busy groups of pikmin in your head all at once. These are the same principles that made the last two Pikmin games so endearing.

But it's very easy to build up a huge juice stockpile, so Pikmin 3 is only ever gently challenging in this sense. It also doesn't have the original Pikmin's time limit or sense of danger, and that can detract from the drama. The fiendish final world is much more difficult, but it also works against the connection that you’ve established with your minions, eventually throwing you into a battle in which hundreds of them will die. It’s a saddening end to an otherwise cheerfully upbeat relationship.

If they must be eaten, though, at least they're eaten by something impressive. Creature design is extraordinary, blending the recognisably natural with the creatively alien: bee-summoning hummingbirds, bulbous Bulborbs with their greedy mouths and tiny little legs, floating jellyfish, bellyflopping bug-eyed frogs, burrowing grubs and bugs masquerading as leaves. Most are beautiful, but all are dangerous. Only a well-balanced and sizeable group of pikmin will escape these encounters unscathed.

It's only in battles against the biggest, most extraordinary creatures that Pikmin 3's few control shortcomings become obvious. There's a lock-on system, but it's unreliable. When strafing around a creature, sometimes I'd find my little spaceman would throw pikmin directly in front of him instead of at what the camera was locked onto. Pikmin aren't enormously smart, and unless you aim them precisely they'll often stand still and wait to be stamped upon or munched instead of running for their lives or attacking.

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Precise aiming is more difficult with the Wii U's control stick than with the Wii Remote and nunchuck, which can also be used with Pikmin 3 – but without the Gamepad map you're at a gigantic disadvantage. This also unbalances the otherwise-excellent competitive multiplayer. In a mode where you have to check fruit and objects off a bingo card to win, whichever player has the GamePad has a massive advantage because they can see exactly where all those fruits are located.

I couldn't help but observe a not-entirely-subtle environmental message as I explored Pikmin 3. Having burned through all the natural resources on their home planet, the planet Koppai send out a spacecraft to bring back food and save the population. The world they find is irrepressibly verdant, rich with greenery and huge, plump fruits that promise salvation for the homeworld. It's brimming with life of all kinds – except, conspicuously, civilised life; the kind that would probably destroy it.

I also appreciated the teasing cleverness in Pikmin 3’s level design, which makes them consistently rewarding. You meet new types of pikmin as you explore these little garden maps: Rock pikmin smash through glass and crystal, yellow pikmin's invulnerability to electricity lets you used them as tiny conductors to power machines, blue pikmin can walk and fight underwater, and pink pikmin can fly. When you first arrive on a crash site, it is cleverly sectioned off by impassable rivulets of water or electrified gates; whenever you return with a more varied team, these obstacles fall in your path, more fruits and treasures come within your reach.

I've yet to discuss the most important difference between Pikmin 3 and its forebears - that you’re actually three squat little extraterrestrials, not one - but that's because it turns out to not be as important a change as you'd expect. Split up after the crash, they are reunited after the first few hours, allowing you to divide your pikmin into three groups and explore different verdant corners of these giant gardens at once. The Wii U gamepad displays an unusually useful map, and scrolling across it, you can order different members of your team to different places whilst you take direct control of another. (Other than that the gamepad doesn't get much specific use, apart from an unintentionally terrifying first-person view that lets you see a crowd of pikmin staring at you eerily up-close.) Working together, these three explorers can throw each other across gaps and up ledges to open new pathways and avenues for the pikmin to use.

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You’d think this would significantly change how Pikmin 3 plays... but it doesn’t, really. There are obvious three-person puzzles, but most of the time I found myself wandering around in one giant group rather than trying to take care of three squads at once; often I'd send a group off somewhere on its own only to find that half my pikmin had been eaten by an unexpected predator during the journey, so I quickly learned the value of a safety-in-numbers approach. What the three-character design does change is how you manage your time. With three squads, you can get more accomplished before the shadows start to lengthen and night calls you back to the spaceship.

Pikmin 3's gentle difficulty mitigates its frustrations for the great majority of the time, but it ended long before I was ready to leave. Its worlds are gorgeous and intriguing, but there are only four of them before the dramatic final scenario intrudes upon your exploration, which for me was after 10 hours. The real challenge lies in the missions, little self-contained levels designed to really rest your capabilities either alone or with a friend. They are strategic, frenetic and smart, forcing you to make full use of all three space-people and even more different types of pikmin than appear during the main adventure.