WarioWare: Move It is ingenious party game madness

As a sucker for a silly party game, I don’t know why WarioWare is a series that’s never jumped out at me. With Move It releasing later this year, which Nintendo said is a spiritual successor of sorts to Wii’s Smooth Moves, they’re trying to use even more of the Switch’s features to introduce wackier mini-games.

Having headed to Nintendo to get my hands on the game, I can confidently say that WarioWare: Move It will be the newest addition to my Christmas party game rotation later in the year. The mini-games are stupid, ridiculous, and a lot of fun.

Loads of mini-games

Party and story mode are great fun and will likely be the staple for many WarioWare players, but it’s the game’s Museum mode that we want to focus on here.

Museum mode is a bank of 200+ smaller mini-games that employ many of the same mechanics of the other core modes. You still need to hold poses and complete actions at the right time, but this time in more individual games rather than a sequence. You take on three increasingly challenging tasks, all based on one pose and movements of it.

For example, one asks you to squat a little and close your legs at the right moment to catch a fish as it flies between your characters on screen. Another, less ridiculous one, asks you to ring bells in time to a rhythm game.

Among just the 20 or so that I played alongside a couple of other journalists, there were sumo wrestlers to copy, uses of the infrared camera on the Joy Cons, plates of fish and chips to get, and many more ridiculous things.

Nail the pose and movement and you’ll progress to the next level, which gets slightly harder. Playing a whole three rounds will take a matter of seconds. In a short play session with family or friends, you’ll be able to race through tens of games.

As I was running through everything, though, I couldn’t stop laughing at how silly everything was, in a good way. It’ll be a huge source of fun and laughter when you play in large groups.

Speed up the madness

If you want to up the craziness, you can even change the speed of the games. There are five settings from normal up to “too fast,” which makes the levels nigh on impossible to complete.

On some, increasing the speed adds to the fun, such as when you’re trying to catch fish between your legs, but ones that require some intricacy aren’t even worth attempting.

With so many more mini-games to play once the full game is out, I’m excited to see how many other crazy ideas the developers have come up with, and I’m excited to see how varied the party and story modes are.

My only concern with Move It is its lack of single-player enjoyment. It may be by design, but I can’t see much of a reason to pick up the new WarioWare unless you have a group of friends or family you can play with regularly. It’s a game you can get out at Christmas or a game night, but it’s not something you’re going to play alone at home or on your travels.

If you’re someone who has a group to play with, WarioWare Move It is shaping up to be the perfect party game. Even playing with people I’d only known for a few hours, I couldn’t stop laughing at the ridiculousness of the mini-games, and with more than 100 still to see, there’s a lot more laughter to be had.