WarioWare: Get it Together! is a fun but admittedly short microgame collection that mixes up the WarioWare formula to decent results. A few of the games are a bit confusing, but the majority of them are of the same high quality and addictiveness that one would expect from a WarioWare.
WarioWare: Get it Together!
Developer: Intelligent Systems and Nintendo
Price: $60
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review
WarioWare is one of Nintendo’s weirdest and best franchises. Tons of fun minigames, weird characters, jamming music, and Wario as the main character? That’s just a straight-up recipe for success. While Get it Together! isn’t the best WarioWare, it’s pretty great on its own. It tries new things and provides you with plenty of microgames, which isn’t bad at all.
This time, WarioWare has a full-on story mode. After finishing their brand new game, Wario and friends find that the game is filled with bugs. Upon discovering this, the group is mysteriously sucked into the game, where they must complete microgames in order to debug the game to make it safe to publish. It’s a silly story that works well to bind together the various stages of microgames, and it highlights the quirks of each character effectively. There’s a short epilogue with a few extra characters, but the story is very short. There are still microgames to find and other modes to try out, but there’s not a huge amount of content overall.
There are over 200 microgames to play in Get it Together!, divided into various themes based on the different WarioWare characters. These range from strange, almost avant-garde minigames that have you high-fiving aliens and rocking babies to sleep, to straightforward ones that have you defending the earth from aliens or hitting a Mario coin block. You never know what to expect from each series of microgames beyond the general theme, which makes each playthrough unique. I want to give a special shoutout to 9-Volt’s games this time around, as there are few things more surprising than suddenly having to rapidly do a teatime session from Fire Emblem: Three Houses as a microgame.
“The music for each stage and microgame is full of character, which illustrates the comedic tone of the overall game rather well.“
This time around, you control the actual characters to perform each microgame, rather than controlling the microgame itself. Each character has their own ability and movement style, all of which are different from one another. These differences make you approach the same microgame in unique ways when using different characters, which makes each microgame highly replayable. The way you complete a microgame with Wario may be vastly different from how you complete it as 9-Volt, and that situation applies to pretty much all of the microgames. It makes Get it Together! feel like its own thing, rather than simply a retread of past WarioWare games.
Once a good number of the characters are introduced, it can become difficult to wrap your mind around each one’s controls on the fly. You have a moment before each microgame to get used to it, but it can be a bit off-putting. Add on to this that certain microgames are confusing on your first few tries, and you’ll likely find yourself getting occasionally frustrated with how much your mind has to juggle in such a short window of time.
If you need a break from microgames, there are minigames that can be played with friends. They range from simple concepts like volleyball to full-on battle modes between characters. You can play these, as well as microgames, with another player. This can be quite a lot of chaotic fun, depending on what kind of friends you have. There’s also a neat online “Wario Cup” mode, where you use a pre-selected character and blow through a selection of minigames in an attempt to get the best score possible. It’s a very enjoyable mode that will apparently be updated frequently, so I look forward to doing more Wario Cup challenges.
The art and sound are delightful, as should be expected from a WarioWare game. Everything looks colorful and weird, which is admittedly a good way to describe WarioWare in general. The art is clean, sharp, and gives the variety of wacky characters some additional flavor. The music for each stage and microgame is full of character, which illustrates the comedic tone of the overall game rather well.
The Final Word
WarioWare: Get it Together! is a fun, if not somewhat flawed, collection of microgames that tries new things. The variety of games and overall aesthetic are brilliant, but the odd microgame and multitude of characters can make things a bit confusing. Still, when it comes to fast fun with plenty of character, you can’t go wrong with Get it Together!.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
