Wario Ware: Smooth Moves

Skinny

Once you've cracked ten characters in the game, the multiplayer mode finally unlocks - leading us to hope that this was where all the game's long-term appeal would lay. Comprised of a few specifically designed multiplayer mini-games (such as Darts, Star Nose and Bungee Buddies) along with a few that revolve around the 200 microgames in the single-player mode, it's a lot of fun, but, again, not as fleshed out as we were expecting.

Darts, for example, involves deciding on where you want to throw your arrow (illustrated via an expanding and contracting target ring), then timing your 'throw' when the target ring is at its narrowest point. Compared to SEGA's dreadful Darts mini-game in Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, it feels absolutely spot-on, proving just how awfully implemented theirs was all along.

Elsewhere, the two-player only Bungee Buddies involves plugging in the 'balance stone' (a.k.a. the Nunchuk) and basically working in tandem to run as far as you can in 60 seconds, jumping over obstacles by lifting the controller as and when obstacles (and holes) appear. As with everything in Smooth Moves, it's a lot of fun, but it's not perhaps the most enduring part of the package. The other two-player-only multiplayer mini-game is the utterly surreal 'Star Nose', where one of you takes the remote, the other the (connected) Nunchuk, and you each have to pilot a nose by tilting the controller in the appropriate direction and trying to gobble (snort?) three items of food before the other player. Alternatively, the person who doesn't crash normally wins, in our experience.

You and Mii

On the more traditional microgame-focused multiplayer front, there's the last-man-standing 'Survival' mode, where up to 12 players can take it in turns to play a random microgame (notable for its hilarious depiction of your Miis as angels...). Lifeline, meanwhile, is based on points and rounds, so that you each take it in turns to play a microgame, with more points and therefore more lifelines earned for the final, decisive round where all five players are all strung up by a rope. From there, you have to take it in turns to cut a lifeline, but in true evil WarioWare style, you can't tell specifically whether it's an opponent's lifeline that you're cutting, so you might inadvertently cut your own. Them's the breaks.

Bomb mode, meanwhile, hinges around not exploding the Form Baton. Again based around microgames, you have to successfully get through a microgame, and then try and hinder your opponent by choosing which form you want them to attempt. If they, too, succeed, the baton passes onto the next player (up to five) and so it goes on until the last person remains. The returning Balloon mode is also based on microgames (and also for up to five players), but spices things up by allowing players to inflate a balloon as much or as little as they like in the given amount of time, only passing the baton back once you've cleared a round - but the more you mess up, the more chance you have of the balloon popping during your turn. Unless there's some uber secret unlockables that we haven't yet discovered, then that's your lot, unfortunately.

As with all the WarioWare games to date, the stylised visuals are about as deliberately simplistic as any game out there, but nevertheless have a huge amount of charm despite the familiarity. Needless to say, the goofy day-glo style is hardly a technical tour-de-force, but neither could you reasonably expect it to be. Where WarioWare Smooth Moves wins above anything else is how wonderfully it uses the Wii Remote. In the same way that WarioWare Twisted on the GBA (still bafflingly unreleased in Europe) used the gyrosensor to excellent effect, this goes even further by being able to utilise a controller that has even more permutations.

Hollow

If there's one overriding criticism, though, it's the feeling that the game's building up to something, but that something never really arrives. By the time you've worked through all the different forms, Smooth Moves really needs to kick on to another level and construct a more expansive game around what you've learned. Instead, all the game can really offer is faster and harder variations on what you've done, which might be an incentive to certain players who want to eke out every last morsel of enjoyment from the game, but for the rest of us, it lacks substance - something the Cube incarnation of WarioWare was just as guilty of.

Admittedly, the control innovations and a fresh set of microgames address that to a degree, but it'd be nice to see a full home version of WarioWare that doesn't simply follow the same structure that serves the handheld market perfectly. Sat at home, you've got more time to kill and arguably need more content to take advantage of that. Instead we've got multiplayer. But, even in that department, you're left with the distinct impression that there's not enough to keep you going, and certainly not enough unique party games to keep you coming back again and again. Smooth Moves is a game you'll have a riot with over a couple of multiplayer sessions, but beyond that we're not convinced.