Sorry for snapping at you; I've been a bit grumpy lately.
In any case, the leveling system will go much higher than just level 10 in the actual game, meaning that once you get farther in, any enemy from a past level will be an instant kill with the inhale. Also, I hope you noticed that the abilities gain more attacks the more you use them.
I'm glad you liked the hub world's controls and camera control, but the fact is that they don't show how the most important parts of any Kirby game - the inhaling and abilities - could be handled. I personally don't see how they could.
The models may feel like 64 because we're trying to keep them relatively low poly in order to prevent slowdown on as many computers as possible, but we have tried to make the models much higher quality than the pretty lazily done models of K64. The biggest reason that people think the game feels like 64, I feel, is just the fact that it is a 2.5D Kirby game, and 64 was the only one made ever.