Super 56

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-8 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Super 56, released in 2023 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2026, is an Arcade-style Party Game vaguely similar to the WarioWare franchise, but where all of the included minigames are controlled with a single button, and in fact even the menus are designed to be navigated using a single button.

The presentation in Super 56 definitely seeks to match the wacky energy of the WarioWare games, with an eclectic mix of 2D and 3D elements, often stylistically-simple or ugly, designed to be bizarre and silly. Fittingly, this game features similarly absurd music to match, often sung poorly in Japanese, and with everything wrapped in a strange framing device involving a new arrival at hell roped into helping his monstrous roommates beat a videogame. This is a game that aims to seem shoddy and nonsensical and it succeeds at this, and I mean this in a good way.

The gameplay has players proceeding through the game’s 56 minigames, and just to be clear these aren’t quite as brief as WarioWare’s “microgames”, but they are fairly short and simple. At first, you progress through these minigames in a set order that remains the same every time, but after a few play-throughs you unlock the ability to randomize them.

For the games themselves, they vary greatly not just in style and content, but quality. Some of these are wildly inventive – you have a tennis minigame where you don’t take the role of a player, but a ball boy racing to collect the ball when it hits the net before a dog can get it, a Doom-style First-Person shooter where you need to pull the trigger when the gun is pointing at enemies, and a scene from a Racing game where you can only turn left.

Other games are clearly copying something else – there’s an Angry Birds-style minigame where you’re helping an archer shoot apples off of statues, and there’s a Flappy Bird-style minigame where you’re controlling a swimming dolphin avoiding octopi and rocks. Then there are minigames where you’re just button-mashing, like the very first minigame where you need to hit the button 100 times before a timer lapses. Ugh.

Like the games themselves, the controls are inconsistent. And often, it feels like the one-button requirement was imposed on these games even when it seems like it would be more satisfying to be able to control the games in a more traditional manner.

The result is that Super 56 feels like it had the potential to be a solid WarioWare alternative, but that it simply didn’t have 56 games worth of good ideas to fit its single-button theme, and the title as a whole suffers as a result. I can’t help but wonder what this game would have looked like if it ditched its attachment to its one-button idea and its creator allowed themselves to just do the WarioWare formula straight. Alas, that isn’t the game we received here, and instead we got a game that’s amusing enough that some will feel it’s worth its $7 price tag, but that doesn’t hold a candle to Wario’s franchise.

tl;dr – Super 56 is an Arcade-style Party Game clearly styled after the WarioWare franchise, and while it does a good job reaching that franchise’s level of manic absurdity, its rigid insistence on its games all controlling with a single button feels limiting in a way that hurts this game. Players will likely still find this worth checking out given its relatively low $7 price tag, but Super 56 simply is not on the same level as the WarioWare games it copies.

Grade: C+

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