The king of killing time is back.

Key Takeaways

  • If you don’t like a particular minigame in Get It Together, just wait 15 seconds.It’s surprisingly challenging to figure out how to clear each minigame in a very short window of time.But WarioWare feels like it’s made specifically for people with equally short attention spans.

WarioWare: Get It Together! is the ninth installment in Nintendo’s quirk-tastic “microgame” collections, starring Mario’s greedy doppelganger and the surprisingly large cast of eccentric characters in his orbit.

The appeal of WarioWare has always been its sheer rapid-fire creativity. Each entry in the series contains dozens if not hundreds of short, intuitive games that can and must be completed in seconds flat.

It was always one of my go-to games for Nintendo’s old portable systems, as it provided an instant bite-size distraction whenever I needed one. Waiting on my takeout order? The people ahead of me are taking forever to disembark from the plane? This guy cornered me at a party and he’s extremely boring? WarioWare time. It always had my back when I needed it.

Get It Together is the debut of the series on the Switch, and frankly, it’s crazy it took this long. The Switch is the modern go-to system for multiplayer shenanigans and portable play, both of which are WarioWare’s specialty. It might move a little too fast for my aging brains and hands, by this point, but it’s hard to dislike.

Quality Testing Is Job One

Wario’s latest attempt at game design ends up getting him, and a couple of dozen of his friends and employees sucked directly into its code.

Whenever I clear one on the first try, even when it’s something simple, I feel like a low-key genius.

Once there, they discover the game is corrupted by actual bugs, which leave a trail of destruction behind them in the code. Wario and his crew all come equipped with a particular skill and set out to use that to stomp all the bugs, reunite their team, and eventually escape into the real world.

In each level, you’ve got four lives with which to successfully win a random assortment of microgames, which tests your reaction time, pattern recognition, and a broad variety of other skills. You’re usually given a problem and asked to recognize, then solve it, in seconds.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the speed at which Get It Together moves. I always feel like I’m on the verge of failure with each new microgame. Conversely, whenever I clear one on the first try, even when it’s something simple, I feel like a low-key genius.

It’s not so much the difficulty of the microgame as it is being able to tell at a glance what it is you’re supposed to be doing, then doing it before time runs out.

Just the Thing to Let Your Kids Style On You

You can run solo or with a buddy through Get It Together’s story mode, which lets you gradually unlock all of its microgames for practice and score runs later. It’s a little irritating that almost nothing is initially available for play, but it takes very little time to plow through story mode.

After that, Get It Together extends its duration through special Mission challenges, up to a 3-player co-op, and sheer personality.

One of the slight irritations of the game is that every member of your crew has a different set of abilities, ranging from the simple—Cricket can jump, and that’s it—to the complex. Mona can throw a boomerang which you can control freely until you call it back to her hand.

What that means in practice, at least from where I’m sitting, is that you’re almost always better off keeping things simple. Most of the puzzles are character-agnostic, and some are actually made harder by who you’re using. Dr. Crygor, in particular, is best avoided.

I can appreciate that the WarioWare cast, at this point, is a big part of the series’s appeal, but Get It Together is really scrambling for opportunities to include everyone. As a result, it makes the story mode a pain.

If you can get past that, though, Get It Together is, like previous WarioWare games, a perfect game for portable Switch play. It’s fast, seldom repetitive, and can be played in short, intense bursts by yourself or with a buddy of any age. Just be sure to give yourself some time to burn through its story mode before you take Get It Together on the road with you.

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