WarioWare Gold Reviews
Long gone are the days of piling into a room with your friends to play WarioWare Smooth Moves on the Wii. Perhaps that’s why WarioWare Gold to a veteran player feels like an afterthought. There’s no chance of getting salty with your friends on a 3DS with no local download play and no stereoscopic 3D. If you’ve got a three-hour car journey with your kids over the summer, WarioWare Gold will just about fill that gap. Sorry Wario, we just expected more.
WarioWare Gold slightly redeems itself only after you've suffered through the feeble punchlines of the Story mode and have unlocked Challenge mode, which puts bizarre roadblocks in front of the player that affect your interactions with the microgames.
As a first-party Nintendo game, it's entirely possible my expectations were a little too high going into the game. That said, it didn't feel worth the storage space it took up on my SD card, even though I got it for free. The game aims for surreal and surprising, but just feels shallow. Desperate to find something nice to say about WarioWare Gold, I even tried the "kid test" and ran it by my young niece.
WarioWare Gold doesn’t really add anything new to the franchise. You know what though? I think that, although it’s a tad disappointing, that’s absolutely okay. It’s brilliant to actually get a brand new WarioGame after nine long years, and this one boasts of of the best WarioWare has to offer, which is frantically fun microgames, lots of little things to play around with, and totally bizarre content… though I’ll always miss Wobbly Bobbly from WarioWare Inc. Mega Party Games, I destroyed people with that in game nights. Whether you’re entering a relay race with a gorilla, wasting bog roll, playing an extreme version of patty cake, you’re in for a barrel (or 3DS) full of fun and laughs!
WarioWare Gold is a wonderful addition to the 3DS library at such a late point in the system's life cycle. Its presentation is largely brilliant, with bright, bold, punchy animations and a seemingly endless variety of visual styles within the microgames themselves.
Clever tweaks make this far more than a greatest hits package.
It's a shame this is a greatest hits compilation and not a sequel but seeing the full madness of the series in one game is a wonderful journey of imagination and surreal humour.
With the way Gold brings 15 years of WarioWare together and slathers them in new layers of weird, manic energy, it serves as a much-needed salute to this underrated, often genius series. More than that, it’s a fitting testament to the last 15 years of daring ideas and handheld consoles from Nintendo, an era that’s possibly coming to a close.