It’s time to get your waggle back on with WarioWare: Move It!, the latest in the quirky microgame series, and a spiritual successor to WarioWare: Smooth Moves from the Nintendo Wii.
WarioWare has always swung from one idea and controller gimmick to another, from the second game bunging a rotation and rumble sensor into the Game Boy Advance cartridge, the third embracing the DS stylus, and then Smooth Moves being all about the Wiimote. It’s Smooth Moves that WarioWare: Move it! really takes after, asking players to pick up a Joy-Con or two and embrace motion-controlled shenanigans.
Just as in other WarioWare games, each microgame is just a few seconds, giving you moments to take in a inevitably bizarre scene and figure out what you’re meant to do before a timer expires. You generally have just one or two rapid reactions to make in order to succeed, but where Get It Together! had a quick button tap and analogue stick input, Move It! has you physically moving.
Without buttons, Move It! has you learn and adopt particular stances before each microgame. Choo-Choo, for example, has you hinge your arm 90º forward, ready to chug like a train, Knight puts your hands above one another like you’re holding the handle of a sword, while Sky Stretch raises both hands up above your head. There’s plenty more stances beside this, but the key is that what each microgame asks you to do is always a little unexpected the first time round.
Oh sure, you will inevitably use Choo-Choo to drive a train and try to stop in the station, but there’s a whole bunch of fun and silly variations on a theme. The Fashionista stance with a hand by your head and one , for example, is used to have you whirl and then throw a lasso in one game, but then you’re shining a shell with a totally different motion in another from that same pose.
The squatting pose can be a pretty rough one to hold – who likes doing squats? – but lends itself well to a motion game of Sumo Says, some thigh-clenching Thigh Fishing, doing a timed “Buttgraph” with a sharp drop downwards, and trying to “draw” a shape with butt motions.
Needless to say, you can obviously play this game solo, but it’s going to be far more rewarding to play in multiplayer, sharing in how daft and ridiculous it will make you look. There’s also party modes where you’ll play alongside and against your friends – we tried one with a bit of a Mario Party-style set up with players trying to reach a rocket and have the high score, but with daft and excessively punitive consequences to your dice rolls.
Playing together will also help to dispel some of the mild frustration when the motion tracking doesn’t quite match up to your expectations. Hopefully this can be improved with a final build of the game, but WarioWare: Move It! can be a bit fussy with recognising motions if you’re a little bit off with the initial positioning – you can also quite easily cheat by faking a motion without doing the full pose, but where’s the fun in that?
WarioWare: Move It! is pretty much exactly the game you’d expect it to be, embracing the shenanigans of motion controls and trying to resurrect the Nintendo Wii’s mass-market appeal. This is one for all you Smooth Moves fans out there (and those fans of waving your butt around as well).
