Positive note - the little cutscenes you get of Pikmin doing Pikmin things are cute and give those little flower creatures a lot of character that you don't see as much in the mainline games, and that charm did a lot of heavy lifting here.

It's a shame then those same cutscenes kill all momentum you might have in every level in an already glacial-speed platformer. I feel like there are nuggets of good ideas here which I think could have been turned into a decent puzzle platformer-squad management combination but it's something that's barely explored and most of your time devolves into slowly wading through a level and bashing the screen throwing your Pikmin from that stage (usually of just a single type) at any enemy that appears with no thought whatsoever. Some levels have two types of Pikmin (and maybe one has three!) but I only counted a single occasion where this change required any additional thought.

It takes 8 worlds (per world that's 5 stages, one boss encounter, one bonus level and four puzzle levels) for any semblance of challenge to appear and only then because of the risk of falling off a stage and being sent back to the very beginning.

At least it's better than Chibi-Robo Zip Lash.