Never Buy a Game Out of Spite
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Wii | 6.00 |
| Overall | 6.00 |
|
I am not fond of using analogies in game reviews, but The Conduit, High Voltage Software's first-person shooter for the Wii, is such a complex mix of good and bad implementation that I'm hard-pressed to do little more. The Conduit is like a high-end sports car that handles so much better than any other car you have ever driven but when you get in it each morning you are not sure if it's going to start, the beverage holders are too small, the ceiling is too low and the radio doesn't work when it rains. The Conduit takes on a pedestrian tale of the involvement of the Freemasons and alien life forms in military industrial complex and the the U.S government (think Dan Brown meets The X-Files). It is not bottom of the barrel stuff, in fact the game would have been better had more story been related. You play an anonymous first-person-shootist who placidly takes orders from anonymous voices that appear in your ear to shoot whatever is in front of you. So far, so good, FPS' are not known for their story anyway. The control set-up of The Conduit is the game. Using the Wii-mote to aim on-screen and the nunchuck to move (and throw grenades) there is no room for complaint about aiming. The set-up is the absolute best for first-person-shooting period. Grenade control is very nuanced as well, enabling the user to hurl a grenade for distance, or carefully toss through a window. Level design is poor. Beyond the opening levels in the Reagan National Airport the game recalls the halcyon days when FPS games were referred to as “corridor shooters”. In more than one place in the game you will exit one room for another and it will be exactly like the room before – and then leave that room and have it look exactly like the one before it. I understand that this is probably the case in many government buildings, but this is a game, not a 3D walking tour of post-war design. All but two brief scenes are indoors. The ending of the game is comically bad, you'll likely drop your controller, let out a guffaw and look around to see if anyone else witnessed it. Enemy AI is good, but the character designs are laughable. It is although the artists were told to make comical copies of the Halo 2 enemies as place holders that were never removed. The character sounds of the enemies sound as if they were directly taken from Halo. The game is fairly short, I beat it in under 8 hours, but on higher than normal difficulty I can see getting 15 hours out of it. So how can a game get so much right and still be a net negative experience? I think it had to come down to running out of money for development (they had plenty of money for marketing). Perhaps it was poor project management – there are plenty of unnecessary bells and whistles that look like they took up some time that could be better spent on level design. Or perhaps it's just poor level designers and artists. That's the thing with The Conduit, there are so many little things to pick away at that you forget how good the core game play is. |
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Posted by aspro Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:24:35
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:40:04
Sounds like exactly why I hated Halo 1's single-player. Did you play any of the online?
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:59:24
Yeah, The Conduit = meh. I couldn't be bothered to finish it.
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:07:17
Yoda, that's a good addition to the review *this is for the offline campaign mode only, I did not try online*
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