WarioWare Move It! Review – Your Butt is Now The Controller

The WarioWare series has been known for its over-the-top mini-game action where microgames are combined with party play to deliver short bursts of randomness for single and group activities. If anything, the series’ “randomness” is its greatest selling point with mini-games that look like they have been designed by a 3-year-old while forcing players to do all sorts of strange things. WarioWare Move It! embraces this even more thanks to its brilliant use of the Joy-Con.

If you recall, the previous WarioWare game on the Nintendo Switch, WarioWare: Get It Together! completely ditched the use of Joy-Cons in favour of buttons and analogue sticks. In my review, I expressed my dislike for this because the whole point of Switch party games is to move around like a complete moron.

WarioWare Move It! obviously took that feedback to heart as the game is all about moving around. Similar to the great Wii game, WarioWare Smooth Moves. The game is just about moving your body and it works. Anyone can pick up and play it and the focus on gestures makes it even more bizarre than ever before.

WarioWare Move It! revolves around certain body positions called Forms. There are a number of Forms in the game and each Form comes with its own linked set of microgames. Be it squats that act like butt stamps on a conveyer belt or putting your hands up in the air to shake a soft drink bottle in order to explode in a higher gush than your opponents.

Think of Forms like poses. Before the start of each microgame, the game tells you to get into the form and after a few seconds, confirms your position. The microgame then throws out a task and you have to complete it. Just like the shaky bottle microgame, the stretch form is also used for the nose glog game where players need to clog a runny nose by wiggling their body in the right position.

The chicken Form, which is basically like mimicking a chicken with one hand in the front by your mouth and the other hand behind your back, works for multiple microgames too.

After a while, these Forms start to feel more natural to get into. I kind of got used to the microgames and how they play out. I was also a master at getting into the pose for the activity ahead. Some guests who played the game did encounter some issues through. Sometimes putting your hands on your hips with the Joy-Con slightly titled upwards didn’t work. The game gets quite demanding on how perfect your position needs to be so keep that in mind before getting frustrated.

Of course, the whole point of a WarioWare game is to scurry around as fast as possible to complete the microgame and win before the few seconds are over. WarioWare Move It! doesn’t change this and the intense fast-paced swapping of microgames kept the room on their toes while all trying to be more accurate than others. It is frantic and it gets pretty bizarre.

So bizarre that your butt becomes quite a large focus in the game. There are a number of hilarious microgames that use your butt to do all sorts of weird things. Be it stamping a piece of paper with your literal butt stamp or squeezing a golden egg out of your backside. You even catch fish with your butt by clamping your legs together at the perfect time during one game. There’s even a game where you have to draw a shape using your butt.

While some microgames and Forms are more fun than others, the selection of activities does keep the game fresh. Some games do get a bit annoying and the lack of a decent tutorial for virtually every game in the pack doesn’t help when you really need it.

Some games feel broken and we could never win them. Pounce, for example, saw us place down our Joy-Cons on a flat surface. We didn’t know what we had to do with them. We either had to snatch them as fast as possible or flip them over. But it never worked. At least when you fail or lose in WarioWare Move It! it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. In fact, it is fun to lose because you can just blame the game’s ridiculousness.

WarioWare Move It! has multiple modes to get through. There’s the story mode which is a very short well-delivered series of cutscenes and microgames that teach you about each Form in the game. It doesn’t teach you how to play the microgames, just how to have your body positioned when the time comes.

The Copycat Mirror mode is a two-player mode where players need to perform each other’s moves. One player has the Joy-Con and the other player doesn’t. The catch here is the player without the Joy-Con is the one who uses the TV to see what actions they need to perform. So the Joy-Con player has to accurately move about and hope their instructor is doing things correctly.

There’s also a game mode that uses a board-like design. Players roll die and need to move about the board in order to get to the end. It is relentless though. Each spot throws out the most ridiculous hazards which caused chaos in my house. I honestly won every single microgame and rolled the dice every time only to lose four games because the board tossed my backside back to the start and rewarded my teammates points for doing nothing. It was hilarious.

WarioWare Move It! is just dumb fun at its best times. It never felt too competitive and there’s a certain chaotic energy that comes out of the room when you’re playing with other people. There’s laughter, swearing and sweating. It is party gaming at its best even with some of its flaws.

This WarioWare Move It! review is based on a code sent to us by Nintendo. The game is released on 3 November for Switch. It starts at R1.000