WarioWare: Get It Together! Review: One-Button Mayhem

It’s really saying something that WarioWare: Get It Together! is probably the weirdest entry to the long-running microgame series, but it’s true. Get It Together! is wonderfully strange and frustratingly addictive, particularly in multiplayer sessions.

For those uninitiated, the WarioWare games are packed with microgames — not minigames — which are itty bitty little games that last just a few seconds. Minigames are something maybe a little longer, as seen in the Mario Party series.

Microgames in WarioWare at large, and especially here in Get It Together!, are frantic and stressful, testing your ability to think on your feet and get the job done in a vice-tight timeframe. Pushing through the game’s 200+ microgames in multiplayer doesn’t make it any less stressful either, as both players must work together to succeed in just a few seconds and sometimes it just doesn’t work out that easily.

WarioWare: Get It Together! Review: One-Button Mayhem

Each time you start an area in Story mode or choose a microgame specifically in the Play-o-pedia, you must choose anywhere from one to five crew members. Each game that starts, you’ll be given a random crew member to use to complete the microgame. The same applies when playing in multiplayer, so choose well.

Each character plays differently, though some not so differently from others. 18-Volt, for instance, can’t move and can only shoot discs from a stationary position. Kat and Ana, sister ninjas, can’t stop jumping and only throw shurikens in one direction. Jimmy can throw himself into an omnidirectional attack but can be hard to control. And that is certainly not all.

The variety of playstyles and mobility options between crew members means each will be better in some microgames and far worse in others, and the fact they’re thrown at you randomly means you’ve got to think on your feet in the tiny five seconds you have to complete a microgame.

Did I mention that before? Yeah, you’ve got five seconds to complete most microgames once it sets you loose on them. Some have a brief preparatory phase for you to watch and remember things, such as Feast Your Eyes on This or Safari Tour, but in general, you have an incredibly short time to complete them.

The myriad of characters is an oddly fitting pair with the sheer number of microgames found in WarioWare: Get It Together!, as it’s hard to get bored with both playstyles and the tasks at hand continuously shifting from one thing to the next. The sheer “What?!” factor of the whole thing certainly helps as well, as just about every microgame is as weird as it gets.

Through your time with Get It Together!, you’ll find yourself tweezing armpit hair, trapping aliens in boxes, peeling face masks, dislodging debris from Wario’s stomach, keeping a naked robot’s dignity intact, covering food in ketchup, chasing a sentient toilet, and so many other outright bizarre tasks that eventually the weirdness just becomes normalcy.

Once, of course, you’ve unlocked and played them all.

The microgames it throws at you throughout Story mode are randomized, and it’s not possible to get them all in a single playthrough. You’ll get over half of the available games the first time around, with the others requiring you go through again to unlock them.

Once you unlock a microgame in Story mode, you’ll be able to play it again with the crew member(s) you want in the Play-o-pedia. Here you’ll want to last as long as you can until you run out of lives; be sure to choose a suitable crew for these endeavors, if they’re your style.

All of Story mode can be done in singleplayer just as well as multiplayer, and relying on your second player to uphold their end of the gameplay bargain can be just as frustrating as doing it yourself. It takes teamwork! But with so little time to complete any individual microgame, there’s not a lot of room for communication or direct teamwork. You must work as a finely-tuned unit! Well, not must. You can do what you want, I guess.

Aside from the story mode is the Variety Pack, a flourish of 10 party games for one to four players. A small handful can be played alone, such as the endless Daily Grind, but these games are clearly intended to be played with multiple people and probably ruin their friendships in the process.

The Variety Pack games could easily end up being the meat and potatoes of the Get It Together! for some, particularly in actual party settings. It’s like a delicious cherry on top of a delicious cake. You must eat it.

WarioWare: Get It Together! — The Bottom Line

Pros

• Over 200 microgames, and the majority are fun
• Lots of different playstyles between crew members, and all are easy enough to play as
• The game’s constantly shifting aesthetics between microgames are hilarious

Cons

• The Variety Pack just isn’t as cool if you don’t have people to play with

I played Get It Together! pretty much entirely in multiplayer, and I’m very much of the opinion that the game was meant to be played that way. The myriad of microgames presented are fun alone, but they’re all just better with a trusty Player 2. Plus, the Variety Pack is almost useless alone.

If you’ve got a Nintendo Switch and friend, or four friends, to play Wario’s latest foray into madness with, you’re in for a whole lot of confusion and fun as the game peels open like a bulb of garlic. There is almost no one I would not recommend WarioWare: Get It Together! to, except maybe my grandmother. And your grandmother, too, probably. Everyone else? It’s a heck of a lot of fun, and well-worth adding to and multiplayer Switch library.

[Note: Nintendo provided the copy of WarioWare: Get It Together used for this review.]