Wario Land is here! I don't have a copy yet, but when I do I'm gonna be in 2D gaming heaven. It's by far one of the best-looking 2D games ever made, but how does it play? That's the question with Wario Land, and it's a pretty big one. When a game streets the same week as a 2D masterwork like Mega Man 9, it's got some serious competition.
The Metacritic score for Wario Land currently sits at 76%, which is basically positive but still alarmingly low given the expectations most people have for any 2D platformer published by Nintendo. Critics indeed seem to be split down the middle between being happy that the game exists, and finding it a substandard effort given that Nintendo's done with the genre in the past. Head behind the cut to get both viewpoints on the game.
Me, I'm already sold. Every criticism you could level at Wario Land you could also level at your average Kirby game, and just the eyecandy and a little nostalgia is good enough for me. Of course, not everyone's going to be so easily pleased...
The actual high score for this game comes from Official Nintendo Magazine UK, which I have no way to snag copies of, so instead we'll treat IGN's 8.4 out of 10 as the high score. Matt Casamassina's review text is full of affection for the game, perhaps more than you'd expect from a score that could be considered "low" on the snarky 7-9 scale. That said, Casamassina almost seems to love the game purely because it's gorgeous and unambitious.
Wario Land: Shake It! is a great new platformer with truly old-school ideals. So if you grew up playing and loving the classics, rest assured that you will love this game, too. It's got its share of modest shortcomings. It's not very innovative -- you've seen all this before in other platformers. The lack of a proper widescreen mode is downright annoying. And the core game is over a little too quickly for my liking. But, you know, it's still a really fun experience thanks to excellent control and fantastic level designs, not to mention a beautiful visual presentation. And even if you can reach the end without much resistance, completing all of the numerous secondary goals per level is an altogether different story, a truth that will definitely keep you coming back for more. If you are at all a fan of platformers, do yourself a favor and add this one to your collection. You'll be happy you did.
GamePro is also plenty positive about the game, awarding it a 4 out of 5. Reviewer Tae K. Kim has much good to say about the game's look, so much that it apparently offsets a lot of other basic gameplay problems. Namely, poor and repetitive level design.
The more I played Shake It, the more I became enamored with the game's visual style. It really is one of the more vibrant and eye pleasing Wii games I've seen. The cartoon-like graphics are really whimsical and it fits Wario's greedy and grubby persona perfectly. Everything, from the characters to the level environments, left my inner-child smiling; it really is like watching a Saturday morning cartoon.
The gameplay, however, didn't thrill me as much. The level designs are rather simplistic, though there are plenty of hidden nooks and out of the way crannies to hunt down, and the treasure collecting missions felt a little repetitive after a while. The boss fights are also rather easy and won't challenge experienced gamers.
Another middling score, slightly lower, is from Eurogamer. This outlet reviewed the title under its European title, Wario Land: The Shake Dimension. Ellie Gibson really liked what the game was trying to do, but refused to give it a free pass for novelty. The game gets called for being unambitious and sporting questionable level design at points. Still, she seems to have found just playing a soothing change of pace.
What a relief. It makes a change to play a 2D platformer these days, rather than a 3D action-adventure set in a post-apocalyptic American city. There are no crumbling skyscrapers and fallen telephone poles here, just pyramids and pirate ships. Everything's pink and yellow, not grey and brown, and when you attack enemies they don't explode, they just get dizzy. The plot isn't about government conspiracies or science experiments gone wrong; it's about the kidnapping of some giggly pixies and a magic bag that never runs out of coins. It's a good, old fashioned run-and-jump-em-up, just like your Miyamoto used to make.
The low score is from 1up, where Jeremy Parish has a complaint about the game so utterly specific that it's probably the most interesting aspect of his C+ review. Parish compares the game at length to Wario Land 4 for the GBA, and finds the gameplay unacceptably dumbed down in almost every respect. I haven't played Wario Land 4 myself, just the old Game Boy ones, so I can't say whether he's dead-on or stretching... it does make me want to go track down Wario Land 4 and play it, though.
You've never seen a platformer that looks like this, but you've played plenty. Chances are, you played one seven years ago, to be precise: For all intents and purposes, Shake It! is a sequel to 2001's brilliant Wario Land 4 for Game Boy Advance. Every game element on display has been lifted directly from Shake It!'s portable predecessor, from the tutorial stage to the odd level structure that sees Wario racing against time to return to the stage's entrance once he reaches its goal. Wario Land 4 was a phenomenal game, easily one of the top titles in the GBA's extensive library; unfortunately, Shake It! does nothing to improve on its ideas. On the contrary, it sands down all the quirks that made that earlier game so compelling. Gone are the imaginative, varied, and above all open-ended level layouts; missing are the goofy narrative tics and links that tied the levels together; absent is the gloriously psychedelic sound design. Nearly everything that set Wario Land Advance apart from hundreds of other platformers has been expurgated in favor of a relentlessly average experience. Even the recurring features, like Wario's "status effects" (catching fire to burst through certain obstacles as he runs in pain, turning into a snowball to roll down hills and smash barriers), are barely present and offer simple, obvious puzzles that require no real thought or creativity to solve. Even the bosses eschew imagination and simply overwhelm the player with a screen full of peons. The result is a game that looks vastly more sophisticated than its 16-bit ancestors but plays exactly like the humdrum cookie-cutter Super NES games that made everyone so eager to jump on the polygon bandwagon in the first place. The only particularly new feature offered is motion control, which is applied sparingly but doesn't give Wario any particular capabilities that couldn't have been implemented just as effectively with a more traditional setup.
