Move It! Review – A Wearying Wiication

The WarioWare franchise may be weird, but it actually serves a rather utilitarian role for Nintendo, as they often use the games as showcases for whatever new hardware features and gimmicks they’ve cooked up. Despite this, Wario has never quite found his footing on the unique Switch hardware. 2021’s WarioWare: Get It Together! focused on character-driven multiplayer with mixed success and only two years later we now have WarioWare: Move It!, a throwback of sorts to the motion-controlled Wii era.

Does WarioWare: Move It! get this franchise’s blood pumping again? Or will it inspire you to make some not-so-kind gestures? Time to test this latest piece of WarioWare for bugs…

WarioWare: Move It! kicks off with our shiny-thing-obsessed protagonist randomly winning a getaway to the tropical Caresaway Island for himself and his motley crew of frenemies. This is a fine jumping-off point for an array of cute vignettes, but it’s hard not to feel like some of this series’ outré attitude has been lost. The occasional butt joke aside, WarioWare is mostly cute, safe, and not that different from other Nintendo franchises now.

As in most past entries in the series, WarioWare: Move It! revolves around various microgames, most lasting only a few seconds, played in rapid-fire succession. This time around the microgames are handled via the Switch’s Joy-Con motion controls. While playing solo, all microgames are played with two Joy-Cons, one clutched in each hand somewhat like a Pez dispenser with your thumb on the top L or R buttons. Once you have the proper grip on your Joy-Cons, you’re asked to strike various poses or “forms” as the game calls them – place one hand on top of the other like you’re holding a sword, place one on your nose and the other on your butt like you’re a chicken, ect. There are nearly 20 of these forms and you’ll be informed before every microgame which pose you need to strike.

This structure is very similar to how the 2007 Wii game WarioWare: Smooth Moves operated. The approach didn’t work perfectly in Smooth Moves, as the action constantly came to a brief standstill so you could change your form, but Move It implements the setup with considerably less grace. Smooth Moves only required you to handle a single Wiimote and the controller was simply easier to manipulate than the Switch’s Joy-Cons. While some of the Joy-Con forms are intuitive, others, like “Hand Model,” which requires you to scan your hand using the Joy-Con’s IR sensor, or “Pounce,” which requires you to lay the Joy-Cons down on a table or other flat surface, are annoyingly finicky. Some later microgames also require you to combine motion controls with pushing different buttons. It all starts to feel a bit baffling.

The 200-plus WarioWare: Move It! microgames cover a lot of ground (as always) with almost every one featuring its own idiosyncratic art style, but they’re not always as approachable as they could be. Sure, chopping down a tree, plucking a Pikmin from the ground, or pumping your arms to propel a train down a track are all simple enough. Others are more abstract or require too many steps – the air guitar microgame or the one that requires you to count how many candles are on a rotating cake and then hold up that many fingers as you scan them with the IR sensor come immediately to mind.

I should mention, I’m honestly not a motion control hater. I owned a Wii and, unlike many, actually played games on the thing. What I learned doing that is the best motion-controlled games were the ones that opted to do a small number of things well. WarioWare: Move It! tries to do too much, to get to clever, and while the game scores more hits than misses, those misses drag down the experience. The genius of the best WarioWare games is that they reduce a myriad of different gameplay experiences down to their simplest form – often a single button press – and when you string a bunch of these microgames together, you find yourself in a happy hectic flowstate. I never found myself in that state playing Move It.

In addition to the main single-player campaign, WarioWare: Move It! offers a variety of other modes. “Megagame Muscles” promises to give you a workout, but it’s really just a standard barrage of microgames. There are a variety of multiplayer modes, but again, they mostly just remix the game’s core content. One has a player take on a microgame as somebody else mashes buttons to keep the screen visible, while another is your standard Mario-Party-style board game, and so on. The only multiplayer mode I found particularly memorable had one player with Joy-Cons stand out of view of the screen and another player without Joy-Cons physically act out the motions their partner needs to perform, charades style. If only there were more genuinely clever multiplayer modes like that one. WarioWare games have never had a huge amount of longevity, but I found myself (and my arms) getting tired of this one unusually quickly.

This review was based on a copy of WarioWare: Move It! provided by publisher Nintendo. 

WarioWare: Move It!

WarioWare: Move It! is a touch too clever for its own good, taking a concept that’s best when kept simple and drowning it in fussy unreliable motion controls and overelaborate microgames. There are still some flashes of that old anarchic fun here, but even those who have loved past WarioWare games may find this vacation-themed entry a bad trip.

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