Sometimes, games are just a little bit too ambitious.  And their ambitions transform into unreasonable hype and make people expect things that they frankly shouldn’t be expecting at all.

Such is what happened to The Conduit. The hype on this was massive. And it failed at just about every level.

Read on and see why!!

Developer: High Voltage Software
Publisher: Sega
Date of Release: June 23, 2009
Platforms: Wii

Genre: FPS
Players: 1 (more in online play)

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Massive hype
There was way too much hype for this game. And it’s mostly because of the developer. They claimed this game would use such an advanced graphic engine that it would produce graphics that are just as good quality as the Xbox 360 and PS3. If you were intelligent, you didn’t believe a word of that, or, at worst, were very skeptical about it. The problem here is that a lot of Wii-only owners clinged to this and believed everything the developer told them. Then it was told to have online to rival said opposing consoles, and the best FPS controls on the Wii.

Well, needless to say, there was massive amounts of hype and the developer had a large job ahead to live up to that hype.

Why it didn’t
Well, the biggest problem is that it wasn’t even close to living up to the hype. The graphics were sub-par, even by Wii standards, the online was only a small step beyond that of other Wii games that have online and the controls sucked in comparison to other Wii FPS, most notably Metroid Prime 3.

The graphics, while not incredibly bad, had nothing special, and was nowhere near 360/PS3 quality, making me wonder how the developers were even able to hype it up as such. The models were very basic and simple, the textures were low-quality… Nothing was worth noting here.

The online featured ways to add people to your friend list automatically after playing them, which is a step up from previous Wii games, but it quickly suffered similar problems to online Wii and DS games, featuring tons of cheaters and people glitching the game and hackers. The online quickly became unenjoyable, unless you got a group of friends to play with that you knew wouldn’t cheat. Oh, and there’s no local multiplayer… that’s BS, no matter what system a game is on.

And now the controls. Well, to be totally honest here…. they suck. There’s the constant problem of the game stopping your turning once you aim your wiimote a bit out of the screen. It was a problem on other Wii FPS, of course, but it was dealt with better on those. Oh, wait, the Wii Motion Plus was coming out around the same time, that corrects the problem, right? Well, no. There’s no WM+ support at all, which could have corrected multiple problems with the controls. Other issue: vertical aiming is restricted to a really small area. If there’s a flying enemy right above you, you’re never gonna be able to aim high enough to hit it, since vertical aiming stops after just a little changing of your vertical aiming. This is also a problem with small enemies that attack from close-up, you can’t always aim low enough to hit them. There’s other problems with the controls, of course, like bad implementation of motion controls in there. Try keeping your aim while doing a melee attack… it’s not happening. Throwing grenades is a hassle and the nunchuk is too sensitive, sometimes throwing at the smallest of movements on your part. They basically screwed up the controls as much as they could. After Metroid Prime 3 proved that FPS gameplay could be done right on the Wii, even WITHOUT WM+, why didn’t they jut mimic it?

There’s other problems with the game as well. The story is horrible and doesn’t explain anything. And you never understand why you’re the only one who can save the world, since you’re just a normal guy. Some documents and stuff are scattered through levels with some story details, but developers need to realize that it’s a bad idea to do that. If it’s just a bit extra stuff that isn’t needed to get the story as a whole it’s fine, but when most of the story is told there, it’s really stupid.

I might as well add here the completely random spikes in difficulty. I play through a few hours of the game, only dying once or twice because I threw grenades at myself by error (because of the sensitive nunchuk). Then I get to a building where tons of enemies are coming out of, and of course there’s enemy generators inside the building so unless you destroy them fast, which is pretty much impossible, you’re stuck against a lot of enemies that have deadly accuracy with weapons that can kill you in 1 hit… nice. And of course said weapon is never as effective if you’re using it. Why does the game go from painfully easy to stupidly hard in a matter of minutes? That shouldn’t happen.

Overall
Random difficulty spikes. Disappointing graphics. Bad controls. Horrible story that made no sense. Disappointing online full of cheaters and hackers. There’s not a lot of redeeming qualities in this game. The hype was just so huge, it was pretty much assured disaster. I was skeptical about it all, of course, and approched the game with caution, knowing it probably wouldn’t be that great. And I was right.

This is the perfect example of a game destroyed by unreasonable hype. And a perfect example of a game that didn’t.

The Save Factor
As of the moment of this writing, The Conduit has a starting price of $50. Way too high. The Save Factor for this one is:

$10 (there’s better FPS on other consoles AND on the Wii, get the Metroid Prime Trilogy instead)

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, The Games That Didn't, wii