Wario World is a throw back to the awesome 2D side scrolling (SS) platform games that I played as a kid. You mean like Super Mario Bros. 3? Yes, except SMB3 is one of the best games of all time and I am having difficulty placing Wario World that high on the list. The major thing that makes this game different is that it does in fact have an added 3rd dimension. This “depth” to the game is very limited and takes a little bit of getting used to. Before I spoil all the fun, let me tell you a little bit about the story.
Wario taking out some enemies by swinging a statue around.
I think it is safe to say that Wario is greedy. Wario is hanging out and suddenly his treasure turns into a myriad of different creatures. Needless to say, Wario is less than thrilled with the recent developments. Of course he sets out to get his stuff back and ends up battling thru 12 levels in 4 worlds (1 level in each world is strictly a Boss Fight). I will be the first to admit that I felt the game was a little on the short side, but each level has quite a bit to accomplish before it is 100% complete. Sure, you can run thru the game in probably 2-3 hours, but I like to collect every last treasure etc etc so I spent maybe 5 or 6 hours total on this game.
Some of the things you can expect to collect are treasure pieces, gold, and rubies. The gold pieces just happen to increase your number of hearts (life) and the rubies are required to fight the level boss. So essentially, you only really have to get the rubies, but it is a pretty pointless game if you don’t make some sort of effort to collect everything else. I personally enjoy games where you have to collect various objects and so I made sure I got everything before moving on.
The aftermath of the Wario Piledriver
One thing I should probably mention is that you will spend a good chunk of time solving 3d “puzzles”. You should see numerous trap doors as you go thru the levels and they lead you to puzzles of varying nature. In the end, your “reward” is one of the various things you are collecting be it rubies or gold.
The controls are pretty simple and didn’t take much getting used to, but the camera was a different story. Since the game tries to stay true to the side scrolling action, the camera work gets a little tricky. In the rooms/areas where you are solving a puzzle, you have control to move the camera almost 360 degrees in any direction. However, during normal level gameplay you are limited to shifting the camera horizontally and moving to a slight overhead view which comes into play in some key situations in later levels. I got used to the camera control pretty quickly but it is a definite quirk that makes the limited 3d depth of the game a tad bit difficult to get used to at first.
You can also throw enemies at each other.
My greatest annoyance with Wario World fell squarely on the use of enemies. They developed a handful, about 7, different enemies and then simply replaced the “skin” o
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them in each level. If there is one aspect of the game that got old, it was fighting the same people over and over and over again. I think this was a poor call and someone needs to bust out a dictionary and look up the word “repetition”.
Hey, he has to have a quick way to gather coins.
Despite the flaws that I found with the game, I did enjoy my time with Wario World. I love platform games and although I felt this one was a little short I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the side scrolling platformer. By recommend I mean rent. I can’t fully advise anyone to purchase this game strictly based on its length. I tore thru the game in probably a week and the casual gamer would be finished in probably a weekend. So in a nutshell, the game is good but hardly worth the $50 price tag it currently carries.
