3/5 ★ – Manic_Zucc's review of Wario Land 3.

Despite being a rabid fan of Wario Land 4 I’ve never actually played any other Wario Land game. Doing a play through of WL4 recently reaffirmed my love for the game and got me curious about the rest of the series. At the time of writing this the only other game in the series currently on NSO is Wario Land 3 so I decided to give that one a go. I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It has some very unique ideas that at least give it its own identity, but not all of those ideas work in execution. The most notable thing here is the non linear approach to level progression. Each level ends with you finding treasure and often that treasure changes previous levels and opens new paths. This is a cool idea in concept but often the level doesn’t really point you to what changed and as a result a lot of time gets wasted just looking around. I know this is inherent with most metroidvania style games but at least most of those games have a map. One thing I really didn’t like though was the invincibility. So in this game Wario doesn’t have traditional health, in fact he can’t die at all. But a game still needs stakes so instead of dealing damage enemies waste your time. Enemies will freeze you or make you fall through the floor or just in general make you repeat large platforming chunks. I really didn’t vibe with this style (which to my understanding did not originate here but in Wario Land 2) and vastly prefer the balance Wario Land 4 struck by having some enemies affect you in some special way, but most just deal traditional damage. I know this whole review is just me highlighting the negatives but I don’t think Wario Land 3 is a bad game. I respect its desire to be something unique. I genuinely like the controls and the visuals (so many pixels were put into Wario’s butt) and think that the moment to moment gameplay is quite enjoyable. Glad to know the series got much better (and weirder) after this.