That headline, of course, will require some explanation. If you’ve ever drank a Red Bull before, especially if you don’t do it often, what you get is kind of a sweetish, cloying taste (that for me put me vaguely in mind of chewable vitamins) followed by an incredibly twitchy sensation as the sugar and caffeine goes burning its way merrily through your endocrine system. And, either ironically or by design, this is EXACTLY how I’d describe The Conduit, the newest first person shooter for the Wii.
Basically, The Conduit asks you to believe that all those things you scoffed at as merely tinfoil-hat lunacy, stuff like chemtrails and 9/11 being an inside job and aliens and whatever it is they’re doing out at the Denver International Airport, are all in fact very real. This is already tough enough, but then they’ll follow that up by asking you to believe that the shadowy figures behind all of them actually brought a tinfoil-hat type INTO the conspiracy, and said tinfoil hatter actually accepted his new role. From there, he’ll be heavily armed with all the latest government hardware and whatever he can manage to pick up along the way from the race of alien marauders who’s looking to set up shop on Earth. Their technology tends to focus on things that are grown rather than built–their weapons use biomass as propellant and their locks are organic–and the centerpiece of their tech tree is the Conduit, a kind of interdimensional warp generator that seems to be similar to the old Stargate design. But, as you’ll discover as you go through the game, there’s plenty of sneaky shadowy stuff going on here, and you may not be able to trust your own handlers as much as you’d want to…or even as much as you hope.
I give them all the credit in the world for assembling a sharp, sweet storyline. Seriously, they clearly put a lot into it and it really is a fantastic story that uses plenty of the things we might find roaming around the internet at this very second. They’ve got the plot on lockdown, and even the graphics and sound weigh in nicely for a Wii title. Though everyone TALKS about the so-called Wii Syndrome, in which a game is automatically docked by virtue of being on the Wii, let’s face one indisputable fact–graphically, no game for the Wii has yet been produced that can compete with an Xbox 360 or PS3 title. This isn’t bias, this is sheer fact, and if someone actually CAN point out a Wii game that CAN compete graphically with, say, Prototype or Haze or Killzone 2 or Fallout 3, then I will cheerfully and publicly retract this statement in the comments section below.
There’s only one other problem with The Conduit, and that’s the twitchy control scheme. A first person shooter depends heavily on the ability to get the firepower where it needs to go, whether it be into a tank or an enemy’s sternum. And when I’m trying to line up a shot, it really doesn’t help that the Wiimote will periodically jerk halfway across the screen from one small twitch of the wrist. This will take getting used to.
But the fact remains–The Conduit just might be, all things considered, the Wii’s best first person shooter. And if you love a good first person shooter with plenty of action, then you’re going to be all over this game.
