19 Best Wii U Multiplayer Games

Fast Racing Neo is the sequel to Fast Racing League, made by the German studio Shin'en Multimedia. You drive anti-gravity vehicles through a futuristic sci-fi world at incredible speeds, against friends in local split-screen or against players from all around the world online. It gets compared to F-Zero all the time, and that is fair, since Shin'en said its Hero Mode was inspired by F-Zero.

It received generally positive reviews, and for Wii U owners who were waiting on a new F-Zero, this was the closest thing they got. It is one of the few games on this list that Nintendo did not make, and it holds its own next to the big names. Players who know the console's smaller games keep pointing to it. If your group has worn out the karts and wants something faster and meaner, start here.

Wii Sports Club brings the Wii Sports games to the Wii U, and online play was its first focus. You can play tennis and bowling against friends online or join a club and compete against other clubs from around your region. Bandai Namco was meant to make it alone, but staff at Nintendo EAD had "strong feelings" about Wii Sports and wanted to be involved. Takayuki Shimamura, lead director of Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, volunteered to come back because he believed he would regret it if he didn't.

The way it was sold was odd. Each sport was free for the first 24 hours, and after that you had to pay to keep playing it. Critics praised the new additions and controls but criticized the technical issues. It still turns up when players list the console's multiplayer games, and bowling with a Wii Remote in every hand is still the easiest thing to teach a room full of people.

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse came out in North America on February 20, 2015, as a follow-up to the DS game Kirby: Canvas Curse. Kirby is stuck as a ball again, and you move him by drawing rainbow colored lines on the GamePad. The whole game looks like clay animation. When the developers first saw the GamePad, they decided on asymmetric multiplayer: friends with Wii Remotes get a traditional running-and-jumping platformer while the GamePad player draws the paths.

It has four-player co-op, and the friends play as Waddle Dees. They were chosen because the team felt Meta Knight and King Dedede were not as well-suited to protect Kirby, which is a lot of faith to put in a round little foot soldier. Reviews were mixed on the drawing, but the art and the music won praise. It is one of the calmer games here, good for a parent and a kid who is still learning to jump.

Minecraft is a world made of blocks. You break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere to build whatever you like, and you fight hostile mobs and craft new tools along the way. The game has a designated but completely optional goal: travel to a dimension called the End and defeat the ender dragon. The Wii U got one of the legacy console editions, the versions that Microsoft's Bedrock Edition later replaced on other systems.

Building with friends is the whole point, and you can cooperate with or compete against other players. It is not the most exciting pick for a Wii U list, since it is on nearly every machine with a screen. Still, players keep putting it on their lists of the console's games, often right next to Mario Kart. For a family with one console and kids who want to build together, it earns the spot.

Mario Party 10 was developed by NDcube, the developers of Mario Party 9, and it reused that game's idea of having every player progress through the board together. It was released in March 2015. Its new mode is Bowser Party, where one person can take the role of bad guy Bowser to mess with your friends' game. Balancing it was hard, so the developers gave the losing side an extra boost if they fell too far behind.

Mario Party 10 received mixed reviews. Critics liked the graphics and minigames and criticized the gameplay and the Amiibo Party mode. It still sold 2.27 million copies by September 2022, making it one of the best-selling Wii U games. Bowser Party with the right group is a good laugh, especially for whoever gets to be Bowser. It is the lowest of the board game parties on this list, and that feels right.

Game & Wario started out as a minigame collection for the Wii U that would come pre-installed on the console. As the number of ideas grew, it became a new entry in the WarioWare series instead, with Wario and his friends making games for a newly-released video game console with two separate screens, mostly to get rich. There are sixteen minigames, and all of them are played on the GamePad, without the use of Wii Remotes.

Most of them are for one player, but four are multi-player only for up to five players, and those are the reason it is here. They bring out the worst in a group of friends, in the best way. Critics found it short on content. Players who love couch multiplayer still group it with Nintendo Land and Wii Party U as the console's party games.

Wii Party U is the sequel to the 2010 Wii game Wii Party. You get board games and mini-games on the TV, plus tabletop games played on the GamePad itself. In Dance With Mii, everybody stands in a circle around the GamePad and moves their Wii Remotes up and down in tune to the music. Do U Know Mii? is a quiz game where players take turns guessing about a player's personality.

During the holiday season it sat at the top of the Japanese charts, and by September 30, 2015, it had worldwide sales of 1.58 million. Players who want couch games keep naming it next to Nintendo Land. It is a family game first. If you need a party game that a grandparent can pick up in a minute, this is the one to put on.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is the enhanced version of Monster Hunter Tri, a game Capcom made for the Wii. It came out in North America and Europe in March 2013. You play a hunter who takes quests to seek and slay monsters, earning equipment upgrades as you go, and there are over 200 quests. On the Wii U, up to 4 players can go on quests together online, and Wii U owners can also hunt with friends on the 3DS version over a local wireless connection.

Save data moves between the two versions, so you could take the hunt from the living room wherever you went. This generation added underwater environments, because the director wanted to try something different from what other games had done. It is slow to start and very hard. With three friends, though, the hours go fast, and for a lot of Wii U owners this was the online game they made friends in.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is the fourth console-based entry in the Super Smash Bros. series, and it introduced eight player battles. Its fighters come from Nintendo franchises and from several third-party franchises, with 58 playable characters once the downloadable ones are counted. Online, For Fun has random stages and items, while For Glory records your wins and losses. Nintendo also sold a GameCube controller adapter that only works with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

Critics applauded the fine-tuning but criticized some issues with online play. The Wii U version sold over five million copies by September 2022. Smash is the first game most groups of friends think of on this console, and the adapter gave a lot of old GameCube pads a second life. Here it sits a little lower than its name suggests, behind several co-op games that players simply had no other place to play.

Rayman Legends is the direct sequel to the 2011 game Rayman Origins, and up to four players make their way through the levels at the same time. It was first planned as a Wii U exclusive. After the financial failure of ZombiU, the release was delayed again by six months and the game was made multi-platform, which upset fans because the Wii U version was already finished. On the Wii U, an additional player can control Murfy with touch controls on the GamePad, cutting ropes and grabbing hold of enemies.

That makes it five player co-op. There are over 120 levels, 40 of them remastered from Origins, plus a local football game called Kung Foot. GameSpot praised the local co-op, and the music levels set to covers of famous songs are the part everyone remembers. Players keep putting it on their lists of the console's best games, usually right next to the Nintendo platformers.

New Super Mario Bros. U was a launch title for the Wii U and the first Super Mario game to feature high-definition graphics. It keeps the cooperative mode from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, with four players each using a controller to play as a different character. The new piece is Boost Mode, where a fifth player on the GamePad can put down blocks for the others to stand on or stun enemies by holding down on them. It also introduces the Flying Squirrel power-up.

The levels were created for single-player mode, without much thought of multiplayer, and four players on one screen get messy fast. That mess is the fun. Critics called it unoriginal compared to prior titles, but both versions combined have sold over 24 million copies as of March 2025. If you are buying it for the Wii U now, look for the copy with New Super Luigi U on the disc.

Hyrule Warriors puts Link, Zelda and their friends into a Dynasty Warriors game, where one hero cuts down entire legions of enemies. Koei Tecmo made it, with supervision from Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma. It came out in Japan in August 2014 and worldwide the following month. Two players can play local co-op, one on the GamePad and the other with a Wii U Pro Controller or a Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Each of you gets your own screen, so nobody has to fight on half a TV.

Critics praised its effective combination of Zelda and Dynasty Warriors elements, although they found it repetitive. It still became one of the best-selling games on the Wii U, with downloadable content packs released from 2014 to 2016. If you like Dynasty Warriors games, you will enjoy it. A friend makes the long Adventure Mode maps go a lot faster.

Yoshi's Woolly World is the first home console Yoshi game in over 17 years, since 1997's Yoshi's Story. Everything is made of yarn and cloth, and instead of eggs, Yoshi tosses yarn balls that tangle up enemies or knit together platforms. You can play the whole thing in local co-op with a friend, and the two Yoshis can swallow each other and spit each other out to reach new heights.

Mellow Mode gives Yoshi a pair of wings, allowing less skilled players to fly through a stage, so this is a great co-op game for two people who play at very different levels. Reviewers loved the art style and found it too easy. Players keep naming it among the console's best games. Special editions came with a knitted Yarn Yoshi amiibo, and any Yoshi amiibo can make a second Yoshi when you play alone.

The Wonderful 101 is a PlatinumGames action game directed by Hideki Kamiya, where you control 100 heroes at once. You draw shapes on the GamePad to turn the crowd into weapons, such as an L for a gun or a squiggly line for a whip. On top of the single-player game, it has a cooperative mode that supports up to five players, with one person on the GamePad and four others each using a Wii U Pro Controller.

It got generally positive reviews but failed to meet sales expectations, and Kamiya was worried in public about the lack of marketing. Many critics thought the multiplayer mode was enjoyable but often lost track of their own group of characters. Five teams of tiny superheroes on one screen will do that to you. A remastered version, financed through crowdfunding, came out in May 2020, so the fans got the last word.

Tropical Freeze is the fifth game in the Donkey Kong Country series and a direct sequel to the 2010 Wii game Donkey Kong Country Returns. Dixie Kong is back for the first time since 1996, and Cranky Kong is a main playable character in the series for the first time, bouncing around on his cane. Player one controls Donkey Kong, while the second player controls Diddy Kong, Dixie Kong or Cranky Kong.

Critics gave it positive reviews for its level design and soundtrack, although its high difficulty received mixed opinions. That difficulty does not go away in co-op, so it suits two players who already know their way around a platformer. An enhanced port for the Nintendo Switch was released on May 4, 2018, but the Wii U is where it started.

Nintendo Land was first announced at E3 2012 and came with the Wii U at launch. It is a theme park with twelve minigames, each based on a Nintendo franchise such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda. The team attractions are for one to five players. The competitive ones include Mario Chase, a game of tag where the Toad players see the action on the television in split-screen and are given only their current distance from Mario.

This is called asymmetric gameplay, where players have different experiences based on the controller they use, and no other console did it so well. It sold 5.21 million copies by March 2023, making it the fifth highest-selling Wii U game. Players still bring it up when someone asks what to play with friends on the Wii U. As one of them put it: "If you have friends, Nintendo Land".

Splatoon is a team shooter for up to eight players in 4-vs-4 matches, made by a young group of employees at Nintendo. You play an Inkling who can change between human form and squid form, and as a squid you swim through ink of your own color, even up walls and through grates. It began as a competitive multiplayer ink-based territory control prototype. The developers first imagined the characters as rabbits, until others around the company said that rabbits shooting ink made no sense.

Critics praised its style and its soundtrack but not the exclusion of voice chat and private lobbies. Nintendo later added private lobbies, along with new maps and weapons and time-limited events called Splatfests, where players could choose between one of two teams. Turf War was the only mode for regular matches. It made online play the main event on a Nintendo console, and plenty of players who never went online with anything else made an exception for this one.

Nintendo released Mario Kart 8 in May 2014. It added anti-gravity sections, where you drive on walls and ceilings and get speed boosts from bumping into other racers. It supports up to twelve players online and four locally on one system. Paid and free downloadable content added more tracks and a new difficulty setting. It is the best-selling Wii U game at 8.46 million sold.

The battle mode was the one part critics did not like. Deluxe on the Switch fixed it and became the best-selling Nintendo Switch game at 71.08 million, but the Wii U is where it started. Players put it near the top whenever someone asks what to buy for the console. When friends come over and nobody can agree on anything, this is the game that ends up on.

Super Mario 3D World is the follow-up to the 3DS game Super Mario 3D Land, and it is the first 3D title in the Mario series where up to four players cooperate to reach the goal. Each character has their own unique playstyle, and Rosalina was later added as a playable character. The Cat power-up lets characters climb up walls and perform a melee attack, and you can tap blocks on the GamePad's touch screen or blow into the mic to find hidden items.

Critics praised its level design and soundtrack, though some reviewers criticized its unreliable camera in the multiplayer mode. With four players it turns into a race for the flagpole that nobody planned on, which is half the fun. Between the Wii U game and the Switch version from February 2021, it has sold 19.36 million copies. Players recommend it more than any other Wii U multiplayer game.