694th played so far
Genre: Action/Platform
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Nintendo
Wario is a bit of an odd one, isn’t he? Starting off as a villain, he took over platforming duties on the handhelds in his Wario Land series (until that went back to Mario again) when he moved to minigame collections as well as Mario sports series. In all of it, he’s defined by his greed and desire for wealth, in various guises.
In Wario World, Wario jumps into 3D, sort of – a 3D platformer of sorts that still seems to have you going after treasure. I guess they found the best developer for this!
Our Thoughts
This game was quite fun to play through, once I got used to some of the oddities – things like how to unlock some of the treasures and how to handle some of the controls. It’s 3D, but starts off as a 2D platformer with some depth, and always have that static camera that gives you that perspective. Not having a camera struggle, and being able to rely on platforming instincts, is really quite useful. The small bonus underground puzzle levels enforce that, creating some action, platforming and puzzle sequences that keep it all fun.
The fights themselves, meanwhile, feel more like larger brawls, with their inspiration clearly taken from beat ’em ups of the past – not too different from my past Double Dragon experience. Perhaps with less enemies, more colourful and cartoony, and with more different behaviours, but it does feel like a group surrounds you and you get to punch your way out of them.
It’s a shame that the game fell down at the final boss of the first world for me. I’ll freely admit it’s likely my fault, but I couldn’t get to grips with how to beat it and when trying to follow the rules I learnt from earlier levels, it went wrong and I got nowhere. I feel I could have done more, but I struggled to see where to go and got frustrated enough that I resorted to videos to see what to do. It’s a shame – it feels like some more explicit hinting would have done it for me.
Final Thoughts
As a platformer, this game is a lot of fun and feels like it foreshadows later developments in the Mario games – going down the earth for different challenges didn’t seem that far off some of the challenges in Super Mario Odyssey. The fighting is decent in groups, but don’t necessarily work as well for big boss battles. I may have been unlucky and gotten the wrong idea, but the levels felt so much more inventive that I wish I had more of that.