Wario Land: Shake It

Jumping on bad guys. Moving from left to right. Collecting coins. Wario Land: Shake It (or The Shake Dimension depending on which side of the pond you're on) breaks no new ground but that's kinda the point.

Shake It's story is pretty standard "rescue the princes" with a Wario twist. There is another world contained within an ancient globe called "The Shake Dimension". During an exhibition of the globe, a bad guy pirate named "King Shake" swoops in, steals a "Bottomless Coin Sack", imprisons the ruler of Yuretopia "Queen Merelda" and a bunch of her helpless "merfles". A female pirate called "Captain Syrup" steals the globe and gives it to Wario convincing him to try and get the coin sack for himself. Along the way Wario frees trapped merfles and collects treasures. He can buy items from Captain Syrup that increase his health and must buy a new area map from her before he can progress to the next stage of the game.

You control Wario by turning the wiimote sideways and using the analog control pad and the two buttons. Additional moves can be performed by shaking and twisting the wiimote to make Wario shake enemies and objects, pound the ground, and perform complex Olympic parallel bar routines. (Really!) Control of Wario is tight and his movement is captured in great hand drawn animations.

You could probable run through the game in 6-8 hours but as is standard in all your favorite platformers there are loads of extras and secrets to be had along the way that add significant replay value.

The Good:

Taking you right back to the days when only had two buttons and were darn grateful, Shake It updates the 2D platformer with some seriously nice hand drawn graphics. The music is catchy and the gameplay is loads of fun.

The Bad:

This game is fairly easy and fun right up to point where it cliff dives into a frustrating and annoying swamp. This uneven difficultly makes you want to shake the designers like an British nanny around your 30^th try at the same boss. In some cases the use of the wiimote's motion sensing capabilities seems forced. Sure it's fun the first couple of times you shake a bag and a bunch of coins spill out, but that tends to lose its charm about halfway through. And when Wario needs to aim something you have to tilt the wiimote, something I could never seem to pull off without it seeming Wario was an epileptic methhead in a room full of strobe lights.

The Ugly:

Instead of a widescreen mode of 16:9 the designers give you 4:3 with a listing of all your items on either side. Lame.

Verdict:

All in all the game is fun to play, beautiful to look at, and has you humming the songs hours later. If you haven't already, go check out the "youtube" video of some gameplay footage and you should be hooked.