WarioWare: Get It Together!

WarioWare: Get It Together! is another entry in the bizarre microgame series where you get only a few seconds to complete a task, and the game hands you a single instruction word: catch, dodge, sort it out. The pace is frantic, the tasks chain one after another, and every so often a slightly longer boss encounter breaks up the rhythm. The series' strange humor remains intact — one moment you're clipping nails, the next you're rescuing a plane, and after that you're solving something that makes no sense whatsoever.

The key twist compared to earlier entries is that you don't play the microgames abstractly — you always play as a specific character with their own controls. Wario flies around and bumps into things, another character shoots arrows in only one direction, another moves along the ground, and yet another can only bounce. The game assigns you characters at random, so you have to instantly figure out how to complete a task designed for someone else using the body you've been given. It's a clever, funny idea that pushes the whole concept forward, though some players felt the controls cost the series some of its original instant clarity.

The game leans into playing together: almost the entire campaign can be played two-player on one console, where the characters combine to create new solutions, alongside a range of side modes including high-score competitions. Visually it's a deliberately scattershot mix of styles — pixel art, photography, pencil drawing, 3D — and the music is just as eclectic and catchy. Reception was good, though some reviewers consider older entries the purest version of the concept. The main campaign's short length is made up for by high replayability: Get It Together! works as a perfect twenty-minute game between other things, or as a reliable laugh generator with friends. It's at its strongest when two people who've never played anything together sit down with it — the instructions are so brief that nothing can really be explained, leaving nothing but improvisation and split-second communication. In that respect, WarioWare remains a singular series that nobody else has managed to replicate.