As a fan of the charmingly wacky and simple WarioWare: Smooth Moves, I couldn’t help but feel something missing with the Switch’s initial follow-up from 2021, Get It Together! While it included the same colorful presentation and wild party vibe, its more involved design lacked the to-the-point punch and humor of its Wii predecessor. Thankfully, WarioWare: Move It! is a more faithful adaptation of the fan-favorite Wii title, revolving around a new lineup of absurd, rapid-fire microgames. While sometimes spotty on the control front, the experience feels worthy enough to replace Smooth Moves as a go-to ice-breaker at parties and family gatherings.
Distancing itself from the Mario Party leanings of Get it Together!, Move It! strips away the fat of (relatively) more fleshed-out minigames and characters, while amping certain classic elements. Both the new campaign and multiplayer modes stress basic-yet-bizarre microgames that rely on speed and precision above all. This time, the smidgen of depth and complexity comes by way of a diverse mix of poses or forms. These have the player hold one or two controllers in a certain (often amusing) manner, aided by the Joy-Cons' smoother 3D motion. These forms are thematically tied to Move It!’s colorful lineup of characters, which range from anime-style girls to cartoony robots and aliens.
Poses run the gamut from the fairly basic “Choo Choo” train conducting stance, to the more comical “Ba-Kaw” in which you channel your inner chicken. The game incentivized me to dust off the Joy-Con straps for the first time in years, with a unique pose that has you let go of the Joy-Con when prompted, dangling it awkwardly from your hand. The Joy-Cons’ motion abilities are on full display here, taking pages from the 1-2-Switch playbook by using the IR Motion camera to read hand and even mouth movements. These gimmicks are rather less impressive than they were seven years ago, but can still prove amusing in their own right.
The microgames are back in true wild Smooth Moves fashion, with a lineup surpassing well over 200 romps. Trials include flipping pancakes, bending open jail bars, waddling in-time with penguins, and even gingerly tilting someone’s head to avoid dripping tear-drops. Most of these seconds-long challenges are delightfully weird, bringing as much fun as they brought funny moments with a zany “where do they come up with this?” vibe. But ironically, while the Wii predecessor partly excelled with simpler motion, the Switch’s Joy-Cons sometimes prove too nuanced and involved for their own good.
Move It!'s more dynamic motion doesn’t always jibe with the flat, cartoony visuals and microgaming whiplashes that take 3-5 seconds each. As such, this barrage of microgames can sometimes be more jarring than entertaining, as it’s not always clear just what the heck you’re supposed to do. One could argue this brings more laughs — and it can — but the humor can also give way to frustration, at least when playing solo.
At times, I'd complete a microgame without quite knowing what or who I was even controlling. Other times I could swear I mimicked the pose and made the proper movement, only to produce little to no action onscreen. Even when one does absorb the scene and grasps the input method in the few seconds given, the motion isn’t always reliable. This can cause some erratic difficulty spikes and randomness. A game can be a simple as pulling out a tissue, or as involved as tilting a solar panel with extreme precision to soak up sunlight. It's hard to gauge how much of this toughness is built into the gameplay, and how much is control-based — either from myself dropping the ball or legit faulty inputs. Still, these microgames brought quick hits of laugh-inducing fun more often than not, despite my roughly 70% success rate of grasping and properly doing the inputs.
Move It! somewhat makes an effort to provide gameplay for players flying solo, with mixed results. In Story Mode (which allows a second player to join), microgames are packaged into sets of stages with distinct themes, bringing a thrilling barrage of unpredictable trials. They involve challenges in which Wario — or another lead character — takes on a cartoony scramble to the finish, while completing several microgames with a given pose to survive. One of the few lives you're given are snatched away in the (likely) chance you falter in your first go-round. A “second chance” option grants struggling players a revive opportunity by making them delicately hold a given pose. These make the experience feel cheap and easy at first, though they come in handy as the action ramps up and the forms get more involved.
The neatest aspects of this otherwise slim, straightforward campaign are the range of boss fights or deeper trials concluding each stage. These include a wing-flapping romp you might find in a mobile Runner, and a sea creature skirmish that has you bashing the right tentacle with a mallet. Perhaps the most memorable for me was a showdown with a giant ant, where I took control of a mechanical bear independently moving lit birthday candles with my flailing bear arms. This trial required me to avoid rain clouds and melt ice, so I could ignite a cannon that would blast my ant oppressor into oblivion. This bit nicely encapsulated that innovative gameplay and head-scratching weirdness I so fondly recall from Smooth Moves.
Of course, the bread and butter of Move It! is the multiplayer and party-game aspects — and there are plenty here. While keeping to the series tradition of bare-bones microgames that end in the blink of an eye, Move It! offers a slew of exciting ways to play them — granting a stage for players to show off on-the-fly skills and trash-talk their friends. Thankfully, the competitive and co-op modes featured are mostly hits. This doesn’t include the bizarre, pointless “Listen to the Doctor,” in which players multitask actions and vote on others’ performance, or the burdensome co-op game where one must keep onscreen action revealed for their teammate by making motions.
Options also include a basic yet fun Mario Party-style board game, a boxing survival challenge, and a 2v2 showdown where opponents guess who’s actually playing a given game. The standout for me was Medusa March — a scramble that blends “Red Light Green Light” with a crude fantasy ARPG theme. In it, you must scurry ahead and power through microgames only when a spooky Medusa head is looking away.
Move It!’s fun factor doesn’t quite reach the heights it could, thanks to occasionally spotty controls, ambiguous commands, and brief microgames that vary wildly in toughness. Still, the series has always thrived on this balance of simplicity and unpredictable microgame chaos. These are traits that Move It! unapologetically leans on — and it thankfully departs from Get it Together! in doing so. It taps into that goofy Smooth Moves essence while fleshing out multiplayer features, even adding meat to the barebones solo mode through cartoon cut-scenes and boss fights. If only the input commands were a bit clearer, and the microgames a few seconds longer, the Joy-con functionality would have more of a chance to shine. These tweaks could have potentially made this the definitive WarioWare experience. As it stands, Move It! is a fairly amusing return to form that’s good for 20-30 minute sessions of party gameplay.
This review is based on a digital copy of WarioWare: Move It! for the NS
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