Wario’s the kind of mischievous villain that will try literally anything to get his hands on shiny golden treasure, adventuring across the lands, butting heads with heroes and even bigger villains along the way. Yet he’s always kept his side hustle as an underground indie video game developer on the go as well.
WarioWare: Get It Together! is his latest crack at video game superstardom, cooking up another assortment of microgames with his motley assortment of co-creators. The one problem? As soon as they think the game is ready to ship and they load it up for the first time, it’s so buggy that it gains a kind of sentience and sucks them into the game world Tron-style.
Don’t you just hate buggy video games?
The WarioWare series has always been keen to hop onto every little bandwagon and gimmick featured in each Nintendo console. The Game Boy Advance original game set the foundations, while its GBA sequel bundled in a motion sensor for rotational games, Touched! had you poking at the Nintendo DS screen, Smooth Moves was all about the Wii Remote’s positioning, Snapped! used the Nintendo DSi’s built-in cameras, and on and on. It all led to WarioWare Gold for Nintendo 3DS, a ‘best of’ collection that reworked microgames from the vast library of games for standard button controls, motion sensors and the touch screen in equal measure.
WarioWare: Get It Together! throws all of those control-based gimmicks out the window, which is rather odd when you consider that the Nintendo Switch features motion controls on the Joy-Con and a touch screen. Instead, it mixes things up with more and more layers of gameplay – something that’s quite counterintuitive when each microgame lasts just a few seconds.
The fundamentals of the WarioWare experience remain pretty much the same. You play through a selection of microgames, each of which gives you just a few seconds to understand the task and then complete it. It could be tweezing the hairs from a Greek god’s armpits, plugging a giant nostril with…. yourself, matching switches to symbols, blending oranges, and so much more. It also riffs on various Nintendo games, from running across a level of Super Mario Land to bop a coin block, to revealing where ghosts are hidden in Luigi’s Mansion, deciding the winner in Splatoon 2, and whacking a Stasis affected block to launch it in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s still such a brilliant concept filled with daft humour that will have you chuckling the first few times through before challenging you on the leaderboards.
You have an endless string of these to try and beat, each selection drawing on a particular theme and a crew member that is its creator and host. Every few levels you complete, the ones that follow get a little bit faster, and you eventually get wackier variants if you complete enough of them in series. Playing through the Story mode, they lead up to a boss level that you beat in order to win and move on, but return visits turn each selection into a high score chase, seeing how far you can go before you fail four times.
So far, so WarioWare, but the big new twist for Get It Together is that you aren’t just taking on a character’s level; you get to play as them, moving them around the screen to interact with the microgames directly. The thing is that each of them works in a different way. Wario moves freely on a jet pack and can shoulder charge things; Cricket can jump extra high, 18-Volt doesn’t move but has a disc on his head that can be thrown infinitely to shoot at objects or interact will rings in the stage, Dr Cryogor just swims around the screen as you manically mash the A button and point in a direction.
There are over 20 crew members, some of which are minor variations on a theme, while others will throw you for a loop the first few times you try to figure out how to use them. However, you are only ever required to use the analogue stick and A button to interact, and each character is given a little introduction level as you first encounter them through the story mode.
The brilliant thing is that every single microgame has been designed so that all of these crew members can overcome their brief challenges. It’s beautifully judged throughout, and while some characters are going to have a more difficult time with some of the microgames, you can always understand how they can complete the task. Most of the game gives you a handful of the characters that are rotated in and out as you go between each microgame, first giving you a few seconds to remember how they work, and then dropping you into the action.
The whole game is playable in co-op, with two people grabbing a Joy-Con and mashing their way through the story. It’s a thoroughly shareable experience, bordering on competition as you both race to complete a level… occasionally leading to failure in your haste. Partway through the story, you will also unlock a bunch of party games and modes in the Variety Pack for between 1 and 4 players. Some take a microgame of keepy-uppy and have you last as long as you can; others have you frantically trying to score in air hockey to have a chance to take on a microgame (which is then disrupted by the other players as best they can from the outside), or the pressure of completing a minigame while the other players try to blow up and pop a balloon before it’s their turn. There’s even a light riff on Smash Bros. as you pick different characters and duke it out with their unique abilities. They can be a lot of fun, and a few of them could easily become mainstays of any gaming night plans.
For solo players, there are a couple of things to do after completing the main story. Firstly, you can go back and see how you fare on each level’s leaderboard; then there are all the Wario coins you’ve accrued through play and Missions that can be spent in the Emporium to acquire presents to gift to crew members and unlock alternate colours and character arts. Lastly, there’s the weekly Wario Cup, giving players a set challenge to take on and see how high they can score. It could be the story mode’s finale with the player doubled and movements mirrored, or the endlessly skating 9-volt playing through a specific set of microgames at ultra-high speeds. That one’s really tricky.
