When WarioWare: Get It Together! released, it was met with a somewhat mixed reception; it was a fun game, for sure, but there were a lot of issues that rubbed people up the wrong way. Whilst I liked the addition of different playable characters since they made many of the microgames feel different, many were hoping for a game that utilised the Switch’s gyro and HD rumble functionality.
This is where Ultra Mega Xtra Party Challenge steps in, boasting a WarioWare-like experience that makes full use of the Joy Cons. Needless to say, I was certainly very keen to give this one a shot.
Many thanks to Just For Games for the review code.
GOING FOR A WII
In a nutshell, Ultra Mega Xtra Party Challenge is essentially a wii-era WarioWare title with an indie coat of paint. Offering 100 microgames, you can either take them on in the solo career mode, online or offline with friends (theoretically – more on that later), or simply practice any of the games that are giving you trouble.
The career will likely be your first port of call if you’re a solo player, and the story is as silly as you would expect given the game’s ridiculous title. Playing as the most pathetic, weakest nerd in the universe, you have been abducted by a fitness alien who plans to train your body to pique perfection. There’s little to connect the body parts to the microgames, so this format is simply a way for the game to deliver butt jokes every so often.
Divided into ten body parts, each area requires you to beat ten set microgames in a row in order to obtain the relevant medal. Easy is the only one available at first, which offers you a bronze award upon completion, but you’ll soon unlock a couple of more difficulties for you to try your hand at. Bafflingly, you are given only a single life to get through the set of ten, which can prove more than a little frustrating when you come across the occasional game that’s badly explained.
The setup works for the most part, but the combination of being forced to play the easiest difficulty first (which can sometimes be a tad too easy) and having only a single life can make it a bit more of a slog than it should be. Flying through 95% of the games and then getting thrown into a stupid minigame where you have no idea what to even do never ceases to be tedious. One early troublemaker that caused me a lot of trouble involved cutting wood, but I constantly failed again and again. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that you have to hit it a specific number of times and then wait for the timer to run out. Sure, things get better after that first clear on easy mode due to your familiarity with what to do, but the game has already rubbed you up the wrong way by that point.
Where the game really shines though is with how it presents itself. Opting for a mix of cartoonish visuals with more than a classic gaming reference or two, and surreal (and oftentimes quite homoerotic) real-world images, the whole game feels like some kind of drug-addled fever dream. Those who like the the bizarreness of Wario’s microgame franchise will no doubt fall in love with the silliness here as this game cranks everything up to 11.
There aren’t many music tracks to speak of in the game, but the few that aren’t there are almost universally excellent. Sure, hearing the same tunes repeatedly starts to wear a little thin after a while, but they’re also like an ear-worm that tunnels deep into your ear canal and refuses to get out. Even after extremely short sessions with the game, I’d find myself humming the two main tunes for the remainder of the day.
Of course, a game like this lives and dies on the game selections and they’re….. mostly good. From cleaning babies, to flipping burgers, digging for treasure, and so on, there’s no shortage of silly activities for you to do. Every game opens with a brief screen detailing how the controller will be used, so you have a general idea whether or not you need to twist the controller, rotate the analogue stick, or whatever. This works quite well, as it did on the Wii, but as mentioned before there are some that give you terrible instructions that basically force you to go into practice mode to find out what to do. The parking microgame will cause you to crash and fail before the level even appears if you aren’t holding the controller just right. Once you know what to do, it’s fine – but it also takes away some of that party element since it requires a certain degree of familiarity with the game already.
Speaking of multiplayer, this is where things get a little bit more complicated. It’s fine for the most part, if a little unusual. First of all, the local multiplayer is located in the Endless game mode whereby you can either work with or against your partner to either chain together the highest number of completed minigames or to see who can survive the longest. It’s not simultaneous play, so you’re left watching your partner make a fool of themselves while you wait for your turn.
The main issue is with the online section of the game – or rather lack thereof. We attempted to form a multiplayer session with our friends over at Miketendo64 and the game constantly spewed out error messages regardless of whether you tried to create or join a room. After contacting the devs, they assured us that only random play was disabled and creating a room should be fine – but that is absolutely not the case here. Likely it’s an unexpected bug that occurred while trying to deactivate random play, but it remains to see whether or not it will end up getting fixed.
Ultra Mega Xtra Party Challenge takes a good shot at being the new indie WarioWare, but a handful of issues stop it from being quite as fun as it could have been. From occasionally obtuse instructions to a non-functional online, this may be a tough sell for many people. That being said, if you a friend to play silly party games with, then this may be worth grabbing!
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