Kirby’s the little guy among Nintendo’s main, first-party characters (not counting Pit “Chuck Cunningham” Icarus). He’s not as beloved as the plumber, the bounty hunter, or the elf, or even the furry space fighter pilot. Still, he’s managed to consistently be in solid games ever since his first appearance. After years of sucking up enemies and spitting them back out, Kirby got a bit of a change in Kirby’s Epic Yarn, where he became made of string and turned into different things. Now Nintendo’s mixing up Kirby’s style again, by exploding the poor pink guy into bits.

Kirby Mass Attack puts you in control of 10 Kirbys, all commanded entirely through the touchscreen. That’s a two-gimmick gameplay concept, which sent up a lot of red flags. Amazingly, Kirby’s Mass Attack (maybe Kirbys’ Mass Attack) isn’t just a passable game. It’s a great game, as long as you can tolerate the monsoon of sugary bullshit you see in every Kirby game. It is, after all, Nintendo’s “kids” game series.

The plot follows the usual Kirby model. Someone (Necrodeus) is trying to mess up Popstar, something happens to Kirby set the gameplay mechanics, he has to run around grabbing stars/rainbows/food and eventually save the land. The twist is that Necrodeus split up Kirby into 10 smaller Kirbys, and they have to work together to beat the game. They’re smaller, so they can’t just eat the enemies. Instead, they have to gang up on them and beat the crap out of them with their tiny pink fists of rage.

You don’t just start with 10 Kirbys, though. You start with one, and have to get more by eating fruit, which fills a meter. When the meter is filled, a new Kirby appears. The Kirbys double as your health bar; each Kirby can take two hits, and when they die you have to grab them before they float off the screen or you have to fill the meter again to get them back. You can heal injured Kirbys by making them jump through a pink hoop, but if they all float off, you lose.

The Kirbys follow your stylus, with flicks and drags getting them to jump and attack enemies. It’s surprisingly intuitive, with little effort needed to grasp all of the tricks. They can jump around, attack enemies, break blocks, and activate different switches, levers, and other gadgets that require different numbers of Kirbys to work. You can speed through a level with just a Kirby or two, but if you want to get everything, you need to keep all 10 running.

This leads into Kirby’s surprisingly smooth but challenging difficulty curve. If you want to just run through the game, you’ll find the typical Kirby difficulty of “very easy.” If you want to get all the medals, though, you’ll run into some hair-pulling frustration, sharing the same dynamic of challenging medals as the New Super Mario Bros. games. It’s a good compromise.

Getting everything is genuinely worthwhile, with secret medals scattered through all the levels. The more medals you collect, the more things you unlock, including several fun minigames and a music player. A checklist gives you dozens of different achievements to grab, and boss rush and survival modes add even more content to the game’s 50-plus levels. It’s like Nintendo took all the content they could have put in the uninspired Star Fox 64 3D and instead shoved it all into Kirby’s Mass Attack.

How are the graphics? It’s Kirby. Everything’s colorful, smiling, and cute. You’ll barf glitter.

If you like quirky platforming and an obsessive-compulsion-tickling number of unlockables, you’ll like Kirby Mass Attack. It’s painfully cute, but it’s also genuinely fun and original.