Wario land 4 is full of all sorts of clever little gimmicks and has an excellent style, but it never seems very complete. Wario Land 1-3 are each very meaty games so the next gen upgrade feeling more like a light snack is a bit disappointing. Even more disapointing is how undercooked everything feels. The transformations in a standard platformer with health just feel off and just downright trial and error for a new player. Having played Wario Land 2 and 3 a lot I could pretty easily assume what would cause Wario to transform vs what harms him, but to a totally new player there is no difference between a the damaging pointy spears enemies wield compared to the pointy arrows which cause a transformation.

The central new gimmick of two layered levels, one half being normal and the other being a race back to the finish, is cool but the time limit is way to lenient and the actual alterations to level design vary between levels. Some, like the lava cave freezing over, really change how you approach the level, while others just have you back tracking. On top of this the levels are too small and the screen too zoomed in for the new momentum options to really give you much of a flow.

I do wonder how much of this review is being colored by my experience with the recent Pizza Tower, since throughout this latest playthrough I could just only think about how much more maniac and fluid the mad dashes through that game's levels in comparison to Wario Land 4. Making Wario Land 4, once a highly innovative and crazy platformer to me, feel very dull in comparison.