My history with WarioWare is pretty limited. The only one I’ve played is a bit of the Wii one at a friend’s place, and otherwise I have purposely avoided the series. My reasoning was pretty simplistic: I liked Wario, specifically the Wario Land series, and saw this as a joke/insult to that series. Maybe it was undeserved, but I never “liked” WarioWare, despite never really playing it.

So this is my first WarioWare. I went into it with no idea if I’d like it. I do like this team’s other series, Rhythm Heaven, but I know they’re very different games. And this seems to be a pretty different take on WarioWare too.

So let’s go! I think this will be a short one.

Developer: Nintendo/Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Release date: September 10th 2021
Platforms: Switch
Genre: WarioWare

So much like previous WarioWare games, since is a collection of very fast microgames, games that give you a one word instruction of what your goal in the game is, then you have like 3-10 seconds to win. If you fail, you lose a life (or a whole character in the case of Wario Cup mode). Then you have a few seconds to calm down, see what character you’re playing next (and the ability to control the character in a closed environment to remember the controls for that character), and it’s up to the next microgame. You keep going until you lose all your lives, or get up to a certain level if you’re just playing the story mode. The microgames are generally kinda-wacky things, like breaking rocks off a plate to only leave candy, plugging up a nose, going into a rocket before it launches, cleaning the shave cream off a dude’s face, burying cat poop, and such. The game tend to involve either breaking things, timing certain actions, moving objects in certain ways and such. They’re all pretty simple, which is needed when they have 1-word instructions and last rarely more than 5 seconds. And a few end up feeling a bit similar, but generally they’re pretty fun. There’s a few that aren’t too great, but they’re so fast it kinda doesn’t matter. The only

How this differentiates itself from other WarioWare games is that you play the games as the characters of WarioWare, and each plays differently. For example, Wario flies around freely and he has the ability to shoulder tackle which is both faster than normal movement and can break things. Cricket can move on the ground and jump at screen height. Ashley can fly around freely and shoot in front of herself (in 8 directions). There’s some characters that are good, like the ones mentioned above and others like Mike, Orbulon and Red. And then there’s the shitty ones, like 9-volt who moves on the ground automatically super fast and can throw a yo-yo upwards (which stops him for a second), or 5-volt who can’t move, but only teleport to where her ghost is, or 18-volt who can’t move but throws stuff… Why do all the “-volt” characters suck? Or Penny, who seems like she’d be good but… isn’t. Also some characters are meant for 2-player play, that being Dribble & Spitz as one combo, and Kat & Ana as the other. In single-player, you’ll play as one of the 2, and that’s kinda odd. Dribble can shoot to the right, while Spitz can shoot to the left (and a similar setup for Kat & Ana). I dunno, this is a strange one, not a fan of this design.

I’m actually fine with the characters being really varied in functionality, and I’m even fine with the ones that suck because they add variety and challenge. It’s fun getting an unexpected character in an unexpected level and having to figure out in about 2 seconds “how am I supposed to beat this microgame with this shitty moveset?” and such. The characters gimmick still manages to make it feel like WarioWare because you’re still interacting with the same kind of weird, clashing graphic styles (sometimes having literal photos of things), and they’re all as weird as usual. One thing though, is that I think some of the games are actually impossible if you get the incorrect character. There’s games I think Orbulon can’t beat (I got an “escape from the garbage bag” microgame where I could just do nothing as him), for example, or characters that have such unwieldy moves that you’re essentially sure to lose a life in some microgames.

As for game flow, there’s a story mode, where for each character you need to do a level, which requires you to finish 15 microgames, the last one which is a boss minigame. The boss minigames are pretty much all shit. Once you beat the story and have all the characters, you have everything unlocked and this is kinda when the game really starts. The story isn’t super long, you can probably finish that in an hour or 3. I actually made it longer for myself because I didn’t use coins to continue from a level if I died, I’d restart from the beginning because I thought using coins was cheating. And even then, only one level took me more than 2 tries (I think 2 of the boss minigames kinda messed with me).

After the story is done, there’s still plenty to do. You can unlock missing microgames (because you’re not unlocking all of them on your first go through each story level), there’s a pile of minigames if you want to waste some time (I didn’t really care for any of the ones I can play alone) and there’s a lot of achievements to unlock, which for most people will be the main way to have fun with this game. Some require beating minigames in specific, not-straightforward ways, leveling up your characters. Wario Cup also unlocks at the end, which is the “competitive” mode of the game if you’re the type to get ripped off by Nintendo for online play, where you get a specific set of microgames and the ability to build a crew of 5 characters (who get scores depending on how good they are for the microgame set, so 9-volt, for example, sucks in general, so beating a microgame with him gives more points than other characters). If you fail a minigame, you lose the character that failed it, so each character is also your lives. The further you get, the harder the microgames get and the faster you need to beat them. It’s pretty fun but difficult AF, at least for a WW n00b like me.

There’s one of the menu options that allows you to see all the microgames and play one selected microgame over and over until you lose all your lives, with the difficulty and speed getting higher as it goes on. I think this exists in the previous games, but this definitely has an advantage the other games don’t, that being the different characters. So even if it’s the same minigame over and over, you have to adapt to the different movesets on each attempt. That’s definitely an interesting point. You have a bit over 200 microgames in total, but each of them has 18 different ways to be played, so variety is pretty wild. Some characters are a bit similar to each other in some microgames (and some of the microgames it literally don’t matter which character you’re playing), but generally strategies will be a little bit different.

Basically, if you’re into 100%ing games, you’ll get good value out of this. I’m not, but I still had a good time with this one for the pretty short time I played it (did the story, got started on a lot of the achievements/playing around with the non-story stuff like Wario Cup). I will note I played this solely alone, so I’m not too sure how multiplayer holds up.

Overall

I had fun with this. Even if the story mode is extremely short, there’s still a big amount of stuff to do after you’re done with that, and the different characters add some gameplay variety that otherwise wouldn’t quite be there.

I have some minor problems, like some of the microgames not being balanced for some of the characters, and many of the boss microgames being too long and boring. But I still had a decent time with this. Maybe at some point I should try to other WarioWare games, get a point of comparison.

I think it’s a pretty good game, I can probably recommend it, especially to completionists.