Wario Ware Touched! Review - DS

The Wario platformers have always been slow-paced, puzzle-driven games. They’re the thinking man’s Mario, which is kind of ironic, since Wario himself is a boorish, brainless thug.

He’s not without a certain low cunning, however, which serves him pretty well in his quest to scoop up all the loot he can possibly carry. There’s never been a princess to rescue in these games – just armloads of treasure to steal.

This new DS adventure, Master of Disguise, gives the basic Wario formula a total touch-screen makeover. It’s a game that you solve with your mind, not your thumbs, though it does give those thumbs a respectable workout. The formula has its peculiar ups and downs, but on balance it’s a pretty sharp set of brain-teasers.

Wario, Meet Wario

It may share the same basic design philosophy, but Master of Disguise isn’t just like the Game Boy Warios. One of your hands holds the stylus at all times. The only digital inputs you need are on the D-pad.

The stylus performs every action that isn’t movement, and the list of new maneuvers is a pretty long one. Wario isn’t just Wario anymore, he’s Cosmic Wario, Sparky Wario, and many more equally evil twins. The disguises of the title are eight different outfits that kit out our anti-hero with different abilities.

There’s a complicated backstory that explains all of this, but in short, Wario gradually discovers several costumes, which you trigger with a set of quick stylus motions. By default, he’s Thief Wario, able to jump, dash, and bash through his enemies. Draw a round space helmet over his head, and then he’s Cosmic Wario, a ray-gun-packing space ranger. Arty Wario comes to life when you draw a little easel – he can summon blocks and other useful items into the game world.

If all these different scribbles sound a little bit too complicated, it turns out that the touch-screen interface is surprisingly responsive. All of the motions that trigger commands are simple enough to draw quickly, and they all have an intuitive connection to what they do. Even when Wario’s arsenal fills out, it’s easy to keep track of which command does what.

All Dressed Up…

So what’s there to do with all these different outfits? Steal stuff, of course. Each level is a good-sized, non-linear area, There’s a boss at the end, behind most of the major obstacles, but besides that there’s always a few hidden areas with extra bits of treasure to snag. Challenges on offer include basic platform-jumping, switches to trigger with Wario’s different powers, and a whole mess of cute stylus-driven mini-games that you have to clear when you’re cracking open treasure chests.

It’s interesting to look at how the puzzles develop, because as Wario picks up more and more different abilities, the levels evolve to make sure he uses all of them. By the time he’s filled out his full kit of disguises, the puzzles are sometimes downright fiendish.

As in any sort of puzzle-driven adventure, going all the way back to the good old days of Zork, it’s possible to hit the wall in Master of Disguise. Sometimes even the smartest gamer will overlook some little detail, and you’ll wind up backtracking all over the level in search of what later seems shocking obvious.

The trick is to try not to thrash around too much – when the frustration mounts, getting stuck is much easier. Luckily, one of Wario’s earlier disguises reveals hidden areas that are otherwise obscured, so it’s handy to pull that out in case you think you’re missing something.

The bosses are where the game does its best job of giving the player just enough of a hint. At any point, it won’t exactly tell you what to do, but it’ll tell you which outfit you need to do it with. That’s usually enough to reveal the way to go, and there’s still a decent challenge to pulling it off.

I’m a Bad Man…

Those bosses are also the game’s visual high points, collections of big, impressive multilayered sprites. Outside those encounters, Master of Disguise can be pretty bland sometimes. Wario himself obviously got the most attention – his many disguises have a ton of personality – while the standard-issue enemies and level backgrounds tend to come across as slightly less inventive.

Nintendo of America’s editing teams help to make up for that with some real extra effort. Wario’s dialogue is very funny stuff – plenty of sarcasm, plenty of cheesy humor – and whoever composed the game’s treasure collection deserves some kind of prize. All the special items you find in those chests are recorded in a catalog for later perusal. The catalog’s descriptions of all this junk are hysterical, so much so that filling the catalog entries is the real reason you’ll want to collect all the treasure.

That’s a pretty funny reason to enjoy a platform game, but Wario’s never been your typical platform hero, and as we’ve come to learn, the DS isn’t your typical handheld. Master of Disguise is a textbook on using the touch-screen to revamp traditional genres -- fans of off-beat action games are going to love it.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Jonathan Solin