PLATFORM: SWITCH | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
In a year that’s been filled with expansive and rather serious big-budget open-world games, many folks are no doubt looking for a bit of silly frivolity to lighten the mood. Following hot on the heels of last month’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the cheeky scamps at Nintendo have unleashed another delightful distraction upon the world in the form of WarioWare: Move It!, part of the long-running WarioWare series of microgames.
Move It! finds Wario winning 20 tickets to an idyllic island getaway, with the old curmudgeon begrudgingly agreeing to allow some familiar faces from the series to join him. At some point in the distant past, powerful stones had been bestowed upon the island by a mysterious deity – known as Form Stones, these tiny tablets are suspiciously and conveniently exactly the same shape as a pair of Switch joycons! By holding your very own “form stones” in the designated fashion, either one or two players can take part in Move It!’s story mode which takes in a vast array of motion-controlled microgames.
Each game asks you to perform a simple task within a very short time limit, usually around 5 seconds. Instead of pressing buttons on your controller though, you’ll need to wave your joycons around in all manner of wacky poses to complete your objectives. From the “Choo Choo” pose you might have to pretend you’re skiing or imitate a train, while the “Knight” pose asks you to hold your Joycons in a sword-like position to complete its challenges. Although there are almost 20 different forms and over 200 games to get to grips with (many of which are based on Nintendo classics) Move It!‘s story mode is very short, lasting only a couple of hours before the end credits roll.
It’s all delightfully zany though, from the brightly-coloured animations between games to the ridiculous situations that the games themselves put you in – bunging up a gigantic nose by shoving your arms up its nostrils, escaping a jail and ending up in a public toilet, opening a drawer to find a pair of underpants, it’s all incredibly daft but always endearingly so. Up to four players can make fools of themselves together in the game’s Party mode, either competing against each other or teaming up to to take on a variety of challenges. This is really where Move It!‘s longevity will come from – its single-player campaign might be very brief, but it’s great fun to play with a bunch of uninhibited friends!
