One of the oldest – and most reliable – tricks that action games can play is to dial up the number of onscreen enemies, moving from tutorials against individual disposable foes and building towards scenes of obscene, slowdown-inducing crowd control. However, it’s probably not surprising to learn that the contrarians at Platinum Games have decided to take the opposite approach with their first Wii U game. In P-100, you’re in control of a bustling crowd of superheroes, and as you chew through each level, you’ll vastly outnumber the giant foes that are placed in your path. This is a brawler that looks like an RTS, in other words, and a singleplayer adventure built around a mob.
It feels good to be on the side of the swarm for once, moving a gaggle of do-gooders through bright, retro-styled isometric levels filled with cherry blossom and tidy lawns. Your gang enters battle decked out in colourful capes, masks and boots – some even boast the occasional toilet cistern as headgear – but for all their quirky individuality they move as a single unit, racing along the ground like a pack of angry termites, and double-jumping as one when there are obstacles to navigate.
In order to balance out the squabbling horde of over-powered freaks you’ve been given, the enemies tend to be gigantic, starting off with two-storey robots with the shiny glass domes and stumpy arms of a ’50s sci-fi prop, and quickly scaling upwards to include thick-treaded tanks the size of office buildings, and humongous helicopters capable of blocking an entire intersection when they fall from the sky. Excessive? Undoubtedly, but Platinum is only just kicking off its arms race, and in compensation for such monstrous foes, your band of heroes gets to pull off a variety of pleasantly ludicrous special moves, which are called Unite attacks.
These attacks see you converting your group into a selection of massive weapons by arranging them into different shapes using either the GamePad’s touchscreen or its right thumb stick. Forming an orderly line will give you an electric blue sword, for example, while a right angle will provide you with a neon green pistol. A circle, meanwhile, will turn your heroes into a huge bunched fist – a move that’s great for dealing with close-up threats, but that can also prove useful when interacting with the environments. Whether you’re winching open doors or spinning chunky yellow cogs, there’s nothing particularly challenging on offer, but such moments break up the action and help to regulate the pace, as do the explorative digressions that see you double-jumping atop buildings in search of collectibles.
It sounds, at times, like a kind of weaponised Pikmin, albeit without the divide-and-conquer strategising, but Platinum’s lineage remains visible throughout. It’s there in a Bayonetta-style dodge that invokes the spectacle of a superpowered Slinky, and in a block that proves crucial to your team’s survival, turning them into a quivering mound of jelly. Look further back, and you’ll see the influence of Viewtiful Joe, too, calling out from the days of the Capcom Five and the design team’s previous work at Clover Studio. Joe’s sensibilities are glimpsed in the colour; the chaos; the muscular, pin-legged art style; the endless boss rush that makes up each level; and the demands for both technique and timing that P-100’s steepest challenges will require of a gamer.
It’s a Platinum game, then, but it’s also tempered by Nintendo, and that might explain why the team’s edgier fantasies have been replaced with this hectic, sweet-natured world in which comic-book musclemen work together in cheery harmony, and a brand new gimmick lurks around every corner. P-100 may not provide the heroes that the Wii U expects, perhaps, but these are hopefully the heroes it deserves.