If you're just looking to play through Wario Land: Shake It, finish its levels and see the ending, I have a feeling that it's not going to put up much of a fight. But dig a little deeper and I think there will be plenty of challenge.

The* Wario Land series of *2-D platform games starring Mario's disgusting blob of an alter ego generally take the Mario formula and adding lots of punching, kicking and slamming things around. As you might imagine, Shake It adds shaking: By grabbing on to most anything and shaking the controller, you can shake things out of it – things like money. Money is key. Collecting cash in the various levels is what allows you to buy the maps that open up even more levels.

If you've played a* Wario* game before, you mostly know what to expect here – you'll run through levels smashing, bashing and shaking everything in sight, turning up coins and treasures. There are three treasures hidden in each level, and finding each means going a bit off the beaten path.

But this isn't what I'm alluding to when I say the game will ramp up the difficulty the deeper you go. Each stage also has three mini-missions that you can choose to complete when you're playing through it. In the first stage, for example, the missions were:

Get 10,000 coins

Jump on a bandanna-clad enemy

Kill the golden enemy

The first two of these, I finished simply while playing through the level normally, but the last one I had to go back into the level to find. And to get credit for doing it, you have to finish the level – no going in, completing the mission, and then jumping back out.

The thing is, the hardest of these missions will likely all center around the stages' final moments. At the end of each stage, you'll find one of the fairy-people that you're trying to rescue. At that point, an alarm blares, a timer starts counting down and you have to race back to the beginning of the stage. There's always a device hidden somewhere nearby that will eject you out of it at lightning speed, and you'll be able to maintain that momentum as long as you don't run into anything. Many stages have a mission requirement that you make it back to the beginning under a certain amount of time, so maintaining this momentum is key – and if you lose it, you're likely SOL.

More than simple time-based races, though, these mad dashes are through areas of the level that you'll only get to visit this one time, and so there will be coins and things scattered about that you'll need to collect. In one early level, one of the missions is "explode all of the exploding blocks", and there's a whole bunch of them above the sky during this mad dash to the exit. If you don't hit them all on your first pass, or fall off of the sky bridge they form, you'll have to try it all over again.

I expect a fair few people will take up all of Wario's extra challenges, mostly because the game itself is fun. The platforming is just how Wario should feel – a little more sluggish than Mario, but still precise. The animation – with an opening sequence produced by *Ghost In The Shell makers Production I.G – is excellent, the music is great and everything feels highly polished.

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Wario Land: Shake It will be released in the United States on September 22.

Image: Nintendo