Even when playing solo, the idea of recruiting team members switches up the "transformation" theme of the series quite a bit. In previous games each enemy was an opportunity to use a new power, but if you weren't interested you just blasted through them. Now that Kirby's rolling with a crew (up to three helpers deep plus the puffball himself), things get a bit more interesting.

Of course more good guys means more firepower, and recruiting a full team makes flying through stages of enemies a cacophony of explosions and effects, but the real benefit of having others around comes with the clever new combination system. If one member of your party holds up a weapon, another member can hit it with an element to change its form. That means a sword might become a sizzle sword (with the fire ability) or a zap sword (with electricity).

What's most fun about the mixing and matching is that the abilities don't all behave the same way. Adding water to bombs does what you'd expect, but adding electricity to bombs adds a vertical lightning strike on detonation, handy for flicking switches or getting hard-to-reach aerial bad guys. Meanwhile there are some combinations that don't even obey the weapon-plus-element formula, like mixing ice with water or stone with ESP (I'll leave those up to your imagination!).

Even when a combination is fairly predictable, the game is great at creating situations where only that specific combo will do. An early stage has bombs hanging from ropes, and you'll need the sizzle sword if you want to simultaneously light the fuse and drop it on your enemies below.

It's super satisfying to find and befriend specific enemies to try out all the combinations, but it gives an extra layer of complexity to the game's more puzzly side too.

Kirby games are famously easy, which is great as it means people of all ages and skill levels can enjoy them, but there's a lot of hidden depth for more dedicated players to find. In Star Allies, secret switches in many levels lead to hidden and more challenging stages, while completionists will spend a long time scouring for rainbow puzzle pieces. More often then not, achieving these optional goals will require specific abilities, or specific combinations of abilities, to be used in certain ways.

For example you might need one character with a parasol to cover a player using a fire. Or you might need to apply electricity to a staff in order to reach a power socket and open a gate. Obviously this is most satisfying if you're playing with real human friends, but I was very impressed with how good the AI was at knowing what I wanted them to do.

In fact the whole system has the potential to be clunky and frustrating, but thanks to some very clever design it's just kind of charming throughout. I was worried that players two to four would feel slighted that player one gets to be Kirby and they have to be enemies, but actually there's very little functional difference. Kirby can ingest enemies to take their powers or throw hearts to add a friend, meanwhile the other players can use their avatar's own ability, or throw a heart to switch to someone different. Swapping around is a bit awkward, if for example you want to trade abilities with an AI partner, but in a pinch you can always go piggyback to temporarily control them directly. And big boss battles are generally proceeded with a special device that lets you redistribute your powers, and set your party.

The structure of the game will be very familiar to longtime fans, even if the scale of the main story mode is a little grander. There's the requisite nonsense story about an extraterrestrial threat, the optional secrets, the cascade of boss battles, and of course the collection of mini-games for you to try out when you're done with the main quest.

Of course none of it is exactly new for the series — you could recruit enemies in Super Star, solve clever puzzles rooms in Dream Land 3 and combine abilities together in Crystal Shards — and it's partly that throwback factor that makes it feel special. There are other nostalgic touches too; the jigsaw pieces you collect unlock guest illustrations celebrating the history of the games, and the in-game Dream Palaces let you recruit popular heroes from the series' past, with more to come via free updates.

But the bulk of the game's success comes down to how elegantly it all comes together. The levels frequently lean into the ridiculousness of these goofball characters working together, teaching players 'friend abilities' — like Parasol Waddle Dee's 'Chumbrella' or the one that makes Kirby into a curling stone — and then presenting opportunities to use them in a more freeform way.

Whether it's the opportunity to recruit a mini-boss like Bugzzy after defeating him, or the puzzle rooms that test your skills like not many Kirby games before have done, Star Allies is the freshest the series has felt in years, and certainly the most fun to play with friends.

Kirby Star Allies is out now for Nintendo Switch.