I realised how much I'd love this game on the first stage of area 2, where you ran through a street while cars drove in from the background driven by Waddle Dees. I love platformers that use level themes beyond the basic "grass world, desert world, snow world, lava world" etc, and Kirby Planet Robobot does so well in this area. There's also levels that have you running through train carriages, and then on top of the train, or casinos with giant pool tables where you have to dodge giant pool balls, or in huge freezers(?) where you run along ice pops. It's all so much fun. I do think they start reusing too many ideas near the end though, especially for such a short game.

There's a lot of gimmicks in the levels that I liked a lot, my favourite being maybe the parts where you control both your Kirby in the foreground, and a robot Kirby in the background simultaneously.

I haven't played enough Kirby games to know exactly what's new and what isn't, but this game has a lot of really creative abilities, like circus, doctor and leaf. And each one has a full on moveset to utilise rather than just one or two basic actions. The robot suits are a bit more limited in their abilities - both in terms of how many they can copy and actions they can do in them - but that's fine because their main point is to be able to smash stuff that Kirby has trouble with, or pick up large items for puzzles. It also has total game style shifts when using the wheel or jet abilities.

While the story mode is short, you can get a bit more playtime out of the game via its extra modes, like "speed run the game as Meta Knight" or of course the obligatory boss rush.. My favourite is the RPG-like one where you pick a Kirby class, fight bosses with maxed out HP and get to level up after battles. I would so play a full Kirby RPG game (I realised they made a version for both 3DS and Switch but they still only have 4 classes AND have microtransactions? Gross).