It’s a shame that a game with great music, beautiful visuals and graphics, cool world maps, An incredible final boss fight, a great cast of characters and bosses from older games is not a great entry in the Kirby series. It suffers from such boring, bland Level design overall with few exceptions. The bland levels feeling really long and yet the game being so short with only like four or five worlds. I will say a few good moments, boss fights, levels, music, 2018 nostalgia and dream friends make me want to remember this lackluster Kirby game fondly.

Rating this based off of playing the base content, I hear the DLC improves it but I no longer have the game.

Kirby has always been easy, but Star Allies' level design is so painfully simplistic that I struggled at numerous points to continue playing. I like fanservice, but the fanservice in this game really feels like it was using as an excuse for the lack of creativity on Star Allies' own merits.
It's a playable and functional game so I won't rate it lower, but Star Allies is too safe even for a series that I find too safe.

They made kirby boneless. I wish I could be a little bit more positive about this one, but its just really REALLY bland. Updates definitely dropped to give the game a SHITLOAD of kirby fan service (PLAYABLE DAROACH, CRYSTAL SHARDS REFERENCES, MAGOLOR, PLAYABLE M A R X), and that certainly gives the game a lot of replay value, but there's not a lot of point for the replay value when the game itself that you play over and over again is just so bland with not a lot to do in it. Add to the fact that the visuals are good but cripple the framerate due to the switch hardware and you have a game that's somehow less than the sum of its parts, especially compared to memorable trips on the 3DS like triple deluxe and planet robobot. I hope that the next kirby game doesn't phone it in as hard as this one while retaining the same amount of fan service. You really make THIS the game with playable marx and daroach???

how on earth do you go from the masterwork that is planet robobot to this? star allies is even simpler than the usual kirby formula, which is saying something. i'm not expecting complex ideas from kirby, but i am expecting memorable level designs and a great gimmick. star allies has neither.

let's take a look at the couple kirby games prior to star allies. return to dreamland had the super abilities, triple deluxe had hypernova, and planet robobot had the mech suit. the largest difference between these 3 abilities and the ally gimmick in star allies is player control. all 3 prior games gave kirby himself some extra ability, while star allies simply makes kirby's job easier. the previous abilities are also designed for very specific sections of the game, which allows for the level design to adapt to kirby's extra powerful abilities at the time. star allies, on the other hand, must assume the player doesn't have friends at all times, which forces the level design to be extremely basic and one-note.

the story also lacks the impact of many of kirby's previous adventures. while kirby's never been a particularly story-focused series, triple deluxe and planet robobot had pretty solid characters and a decent emotional core. star allies more or less ditches this, and the story fails because of it.

everything else is pretty solid; it's still a kirby game. visually, the game is stunning. beautiful colors and models, which is to be expected for kirby. the game's also got great music - once again, a standard for kirby. it's not a bad game, per se, it's just a much less interesting game than the games released prior and since. it's an odd dip for a series whose quality is generally very high.

This was not the greatest Kirby game, but it was pretty alright. It's Kirby, so I'll probably love it regardless, but I've definitely played better. I actually did kind of like the steady patching slowly introducing more content, since it made it fun to go back to it and see what else they added. The last game mode with the special partners was pretty neat, and it was great to see a bunch of characters from all over the series getting to be playable and whatnot.

I didn't really like the combo system, though. I think it probably would've been more fun if I'd been doing multiplayer co-op, but... well... I'm single player for life... also I did kind of enjoy the story because it's always fun to see a story go buckwild at the end of a Kirby game.

In terms of actual gameplay and how much I enjoyed this game, I'd definitely give it a 1 or 1.5 out of 5. However, this game is hard carried by the dream partners, as it brings back a lot of partners that weren't playable for a while, adds some unique new ones, but most importantly brought back fan favorite characters like marx and adeline as playable characters. Sadly I got this game at launch, and was pretty much done with its stale gameplay long before all the content updates which introduced all of the fan favorites as partners. The content updates are still a very confusing concept in themselves for me, because the idea that people would magically come back to this game after beating the entire thing because of a content update doesn't make much sense. Trust me, 90% of people who played and beat this the first week of launch didn't see a whole lot of replay-ability with these updates. It just really gives me the impression that these updates were meant to be content included in the release, but were forced to be packed into updates due to time constraints. Despite all the cool partners, there's only so much they can do for the overall quality of the game when the actual gameplay is bland and boring. The copy abilities are pretty solid all around with a few new ones making it in, but neither the abilities nor the partners can make up for the level design. While difficulty isn't the main thing I come to Kirby for, this game somehow made it so much easier than past Kirby games that I'm constantly left questioning just how young the target demographic for this game is. The combined copy abilities are a neat idea, but really flop in the actual game. For everyone expecting this to be like Kirby 64: it isn't. Instead of having many different unique copy abilities from combing different ones, most of the combinations in this game are simple elemental powers added to normal weapons (like fire sword or water hammer). While I'd rather have them in the game than not, they barely do anything that changes how the copy abilities work and is honestly pretty disappointing. I wonder sometimes if this was a feature they wanted to add because they thought it would be fun, or if it was a way to bait people into buying this game by advertising combination abilities. Even if they were good though, there's only so much you can do to help this game with this level design. While this game does have some good aspects to it like the partners and a dummed down version of ability combination, I hate to see it all wasted on a game with such generic and bland fundamental gameplay and level design.