Wario Land: The Shake Dimension will rock your world.Wario Land: The Shake Dimension
Nintendo Wii
Rating: 9/10
There’s more fun than you can shake a stick at in Wario Land: The Shake Dimension.
Nintendo’s popular antihero, Wario, returns for another two-dimensional platform adventure, but this time the series utilises the Wii’s motion sensitive controls.
Holding the Wiimote horizontally, players use the cross pad and buttons to guide Wario around the land of Yuretopia in search of the evil Shake King and his Bottomless Bag of Coins.
Wario Land foregoes the Mario-style leaping and bounding and instead feels more like Sonic The Hedgehog, with lots of sprinting, charging and smashing through objects.
Unique to the game is the player’s ability to manipulate the environment and solve puzzles by shaking the Wiimote.
An inventive twist to the genre is that when Wario reaches the end of a level, he must quickly return to the start in one long sprint that allows him to smash through parts of the environment previously immovable.
Furthermore, a level is never truly complete until the player discovers all of the treasure and completes all of the objectives in the best time possible.
This greatly adds to the replay value of the game.
Shaking the Wiimote can become repetitive and at times certain levels seem too easy.
But we really enjoyed the stylised two-dimensional graphics, which have so far been the staple of the Wario Land series.
Unlike Mario, who has made the jump to 3D, Wario retains the 2D style that first captivated people In the 1980s and 90s.
And with a game of this quality on the Wii, Wario Land: The Shake Dimension should introduce a new generation of gamers to the style their parents enjoyed.
