Kirby is back with unique controls only available on DS.
Canvas Curse beings with the witch Drawcia appearing out of now where and she literally turns the world into a painting. Upon seeing this Kirby gives chase to the witch, but she disappears before he has a chance to attack. But she left behind an important item: the magical paintbrush. With the power of the magical paintbrush Kirby sets off to destroy the witch and restore peace to Dreamland.
Kirby Canvas Curse is unlike any platformer or Kirby game to date mainly because of its unique touch based control. In Canvas Curse you don’t directly control Kirby. You see in Canvas Curse Kirby is just a sphere; he doesn’t walk instead you’ll draw paths anywhere on the touch screen for him to follow. You can do all sorts of things with these paths. You can use them to move Kirby, do loops (which increase your speed for a short time), guard yourself from enemies and much more. But the paintbrush does have some limits. Firstly your paths don’t stay there forever; they disappear after a few seconds. And you work with a limited supply of ink for your paths. If you make too big of paths or do too many paths at one time you’ll run out of ink and must wait for it to regenerate.
But of course you still have some control over Kirby. If you tap him while he doesn’t have any power ups he’ll dash forward. You can tap him to dash forward and he’ll destroy enemies if he hits them. If the enemy has a power you’ll gain that power up and you can use the power by tapping Kirby. Kirby can get a lot of different power up such as a fireball, a balloon, a rocket, a beam attack, etc. You can also tap enemies to stun them. That way Kirby can roll right up to them and he’ll destroy them without being in a dash. And that’s really as far as direct control you have in the game goes. The rest is all done my manipulating Kirby by drawing paths.
Because of the unique controls of Canvas Curse there is a bit of a learning curve, but the game realizes this so the first world is on the very easy side. There are seven worlds with three levels in each world. At the end of the third level you have a boss stage. There are three different bosses besides the final boss and you get to choose which you play. There is a cart racing one, a connect-the-dot one, and a Brick like game. But there really isn’t much to the levels though. There is a lot of verity to the levels and they have nice designs, but most of the levels are easier then they should be. Just simply beating the levels is a piece of cake, so it would have been nice if then increased the difficulty a notch. And of course there aren’t that many levels to beat which many leave you thinking there isn’t much replay value to the game, but actually there is a bit if you want to unlock everything. Each level has three tokens you can get to unlock extras such as music and levels for Rainbow Run (see below). Some of the tokens are fairly hard to figure out how to get them, which is a welcome relief to this otherwise easy game.
Canvas Curse also has some extras such as Rainbow Run. In this mode you go through each level and try to do it as fast as possible or use the least amount of ink possible. If you do well enough you can earn tokens to unlock more things in the game. You can also unlock other character to use instead of Kirby which is a good incentive to replay the levels. Each character plays significantly different then the rest so the levels fell semi-fresh. Besides supporting a unique control scheme Canvas Curse also has a sty]ized look to it. It the same stuff you’ve seen in past Kirby games, but it looks as good as ever. The game also has a map on the top screen along with other info. But the map is a very basic blocky design to it; it would have been much more helpful if it had some more detail to it. And of course the musical score is what you’ve come to expect from a Kirby game. I don’t think it is quite as catchy as classic Kirby tunes, but it has the same affect and is nice. Overall Kirby Canvas Curse is a fun game with unique controls only available on the DS. But it is a on the easy side and is a bit short. It’s a fun game and is a good choice if you want another platformer for the DS.