If Mario Party is a full meal, WarioWare has always been more like a bag of popcorn: a quick, delicious snack, but try to eat it for dinner and you’ll be craving something meatier before long. WarioWare: Get It Together! is no exception, with rapid-fire microgames that are a delightfully wacky test of both reaction speed and problem solving – this time with the interesting new twist of using unique characters that control differently. But while Get It Together! looks great and can be a lot of fun, some dud characters and its fleeting multiplayer modes keep it from being a regular part of a balanced party game diet.All of Get It Together!’s madness is introduced through a brief but entertaining story mode, the entirety of which takes about two hours to complete. The story itself involves Wario, now a game developer himself, and the employees at his company getting sucked into the video game they are making to do battle with its bugs. That setup has nothing to do with playing the actual microgames, which give you a word or two of instructions and just a few seconds to follow them before throwing you to the next one, but the short cutscenes that kickoff each stage and the conversations between them can be very amusing. But we’re not here for the plot, and WarioWare’s single-player modes have always been more about going for high scores in a variety of ever-escalating themed playlists rather than beating them once and moving on. That’s a fun challenge, particularly with the later playlists that have a larger pool of microgames to throw at you. The story levels are also playable in co-op this time around, which is certainly a nice inclusion, if one that can feel like a “little brother mode” since the games seemingly haven’t been adjusted for two simultaneous players.Choose Your CharacterSolo or co-op, however, Get It Together!’s assortment of microgames provide exactly the kind of madcap hilarity I want from this series. One second you’ll be removing a statue’s armpit hair and the next you’re scrambling to feed baby birds. The fan-favorite, Nintendo-themed games are also a joy, asking you to do things like deliver a present in Animal Crossing or complete a teatime in Fire Emblem. There’s a healthy mix of ridiculous moments and quick challenge here too, which allows you to tangibly improve as you begin to recognize levels. That familiarity is mitigated by the new unique characters. There are more than a dozen to use, each with abilities and movement styles that can give the same microgame a different flavor when you swap between them. For example, Wario himself can fly anywhere on screen freely and punch left or right with the press of a button, while his pal 18-Volt is stuck sitting still as he shoots discs from his head to affect the level from afar. They each have their strengths and weaknesses for certain microgames, and story levels ask you to pick a roster of three to five characters that you’ll randomly swap between, adding some additional spice to stages you’ve beaten a dozen times.The unique characters can shake up familiar microgames nicely.“Both the characters and the animations accompanying these playlists also deserve a shoutout for just how good they look. Get It Together! isn’t trying to push the bounds of modern graphics or anything, but the elaborate backgrounds between each microgame and the overall art direction are vibrant and full of personality. Tons of life has been poured into areas that could have otherwise safely blended into the wallpaper – including with the characters themselves, who use adorable 3D models that are made to look like chibi 2D sprites, making them wonderfully expressive despite their minimal designs.But while the roster is visually diverse, some of these characters are just objectively worse versions of others, mechanically speaking. Why would I ever want to use video game enthusiast 9-Volt, who is stuck constantly skateboarding left-to-right and can throw a yo-yo directly upward, when the robot Mike can also shoot upward but fly anywhere on the screen freely while doing so? Similarly, the dog-cat duo Dribble and Spitz can fly but only shoot right or left, respectively, whereas ninjas Kat and Ana have the exact same directional restriction… but can never stop jumping up and down, making them far worse. E3 2021 Screens – WarioWare: Get It TogetherMeanwhile, the popular witch Ashley blows all the folk I just mentioned out of the water by being able to fly while shooting any direction she likes, and a unique option like the terrifying mother 5-Volt can be borderline unusable for some games since she only moves and attacks by teleporting. As a result, despite being given free choice of the roster, it felt like I was avoiding half of my options like the plague. There are definitely still enough good ones to keep the story levels interesting, but it’s a shame that “the same but worse” was used as a template so often.Nevermind, Don’t Choose Your CharacterThe other half of the WarioWare coin is its multiplayer, which is hit and miss in Get It Together!. There are a total of 10 modes in a section called the Variety Pack, which range from head-to-head microgames to co-operative score-attack minigames to other oddball entries like a fighting game. The three score-attack modes are largely dull (including a super boring side-scrolling platformer, which I never actually finished a full run of without quitting because it was just so mind numbing), but the PvP options can be a lot of fun… at least, for a little while.Multiplayer is fun, but the modes don’t hold their shine for long.“Apart from one of its two solid 1v1 modes and a janky volleyball minigame that’s only good for a couple rounds of entertainment (hot tip: 18-Volt is completely busted in this one), none of the four-player PvP modes actually let you pick your characters. Instead, they’re usually randomly picked and frequently changed, which feels like a truly baffling decision. That includes a clever territory-capture game with its own small set of unique PvP microgames (which are cool, but unfortunately get old fast since there are so few) and a Smash Bros.-style fighter that had promise but is let down by forced mid-match character swaps, causing it to devolve into the bad kind of party game chaos.Only two of the seven modes that allow for up to four players are even about completing the regular microgames (one of which is WarioWare’s returning balloon inflation mode) which leaves Get It Together!’s multiplayer in a very strange spot. Everything about completing these games and the zany, unexpected madness of adapting on the fly can be a good time with friends, but you are given so little control and things are so random that none of it holds its shine for more than a few rounds. I absolutely enjoyed myself while I was playing, but after trying everything the Variety Pack had to offer, there’s not enough of lasting interest here to ever make Get It Together! a staple of my party game rotation like past console WarioWare games were.To give credit where it’s due, Get It Together!’s story mode manages to make good use of its characters (at least the ones that don’t suck), and the genuine appeal of chasing high scores solo is further emphasized in the Wario Cup mode – a weekly unique score challenge with ranked leaderboards. It’s hard to tell how much long-term appeal this mode will hold having only seen two brief but entertaining challenges so far, but it is another neat inclusion to keep things fresh. That said, for having a ranked option, it’s a little strange to me that your score is partially influenced by how much you’ve engaged with Get It Together!’s cosmetic gacha system. Don’t freak out: there are no microtransactions here whatsoever, so that’s good. However, completing games will earn you coins that can be spent on loot boxes that contain “Prezzies” of various rarities that are then given to characters to level them up and unlock cosmetic recolors. It’s a relatively ignorable system for those who don’t care and a decent (if perplexingly convoluted) way for dedicated players to be lightly rewarded for their time – but your character’s level will also increase your ranked score in Wario Cup for some odd reason. That’s not the end of the world in a goofy single-player score-attack mode with no real-money way to buy Prezzies, but it is a confounding decision all the same.
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