Game Reviews
View Comments (0)
The ConduitBy Jim Webb - 07-28-09 Print  EmailListen up Wii owners. For those of you wanting a game to satiate your pure Lonsdaleite cores, it's very simple - go buy this game right now. If you reside somewhere near Corundum on the Mohs Hardness scale or less, keep reading. I will break this segment down into two main groups. What the game is and what it isn't. We'll start with the latter first since it's smaller. The Conduit is not the end all be all First Person Shooter that will revolutionize the genre. The Conduit will not cause a huge influx of PS3 and X360 owners over to the Wii. The Conduit will not be the envy of non-Wii owners. The Conduit will not persuade Epic, ID, Valve, et al to drop their shorts and bend over for Wii. The Conduit will not wash your clothes and clean your room...sorry, it just wasn't in High Voltage Software's budget. So what does it do? The Conduit puts you in control. Usually you finish that sentence with...'of an agent from a secret government organization...'and while that's true the sentence has a full meaning of its own. High Voltage Software has taken the liberty of assuming the game player would like to have some manipulative command over certain aspects of the game. The results feel like being given water in the desert - such a natural desire that is rarely provided. Your camera turning speed, deadzone, off screen camera rotation, run speed, X and Y axis sensitivity, gesture sensitivity, button allocation, HUD object placement and opacity, etc.... It is as if the developers can tweak it, you can tweak it. And you can make all these adjustments in real time in the game without the cumbersome back and forth pause, tweak, unpause, test, pause, tweak, unpause, test, etc.... Find a nice quiet corner and bring up the control options and watch your adjustments take affect instantly. If you cannot find a control layout that suits you, I must inform you that you have the tweaking capacity of a fish. Don't worry, I won't tell you friends. The Conduit puts you in control...of an agent from a secret government organization commissioned to uncover the truth behind an alien invasion on Washington D.C. and no I don't mean Obama. You play as Agent Michael Ford, newly recruited by John Adams into the shadow agency known as The Trust in pursuit of the alien Drudge and an alleged terrorist, Prometheus. With a moniker like The Trust how can you not grant them absolute control and power? If you've watched, played or read any sci-fi in the past 2 decades, then you know the story already. The Trust gives you a nifty power suit which regenerates your health over time and their supposed latest lab toy, the All Seeing Eye (A.S.E.).- a space age bowling ball that works like a spectral flashlight, a ghost mine defuser, a code breaker, a translator and even paints a handy pulsating line on the ground showing you where your next puzzle element lay. You know, in case you forget which way down the corridor you needed to go. The Drudge have made their way to Earth via Conduits. Plasma like interstellar doorways on walls that spawn Drudge after Drudge if you don't spew bullet after bullet into them...or just use something that goes 'boom'. Gameplay is only slightly above standard FPS fare. You traverse hallways, corridors, the occasional street and open field with run and gun assaults on anything that moves....or looks like it traveled several million light years to get here. No real advancements in the FPS are established here. The IQ of both human and alien enemies is lower than the caliber rating of your sidearm and most of the game is easier than Paris Hilton. You are swarmed by the same 4 enemy types (I call them human, bugs, mosquitoes and big uglies) with the occasional big baddie impeding your progress. But despite these flaws, the controls do make up for it some. Not completely, but some. The immersiveness afforded by the highly tweakable IR and gesture controls allow you to run in, shoot, lob grenades and melee attack enemies with suck swiftness and accuracy that you don't pay too much attention to their aforementioned shortcomings. The audio tracks won't have you humming any tunes weeks after finishing the game but the voice overs by Kevin Sorbo, Mark Sheppard and William Morgan Sheppard are fantastic. Weapon fire, explosions and Drudge grunts get the job done without making your ears feel cheated. Weaponry at least has some nice variety to it. Multiple weapons from the 3 factions (humans, The Trust and the Drudge) provide you with the standards - USP45 pistol, MP5KA4 submachine gun, the assault rifle, shotgun and obligatory rocket launcher (what good FPS worth their weight in bytes doesn't have the last 3?) from the human side, the Deatomizer Mk4, TPC Launcher and Carbonizer Mk16 from The Trust and Warp Pistol, Strike Rifle, Hive Cannon and Shrieker from the Drudge plus a few experimental weapons found hidden away behind puzzles involving the reverse side of the American Great Seal with 3 encompassing arcs. The Trust's weaponry is as expected your typical human but futuristic style using highly charged forms of energy as projectiles while the Drudge's are biologically based. Each faction has their own distinct ammo caches to fully restock any weapons you may have from them. High Voltage Software also made a pretty big deal about their graphic fidelity for The Conduit using their updated Quantum3 game engine and for the most part they have held true to their word. Enemies, especially the bigger ones, show texture detail and high end shader effects not often seen in Wii titles such as projected textures and various forms of bump mapping. To sum up, they look fantastic. In fact, even when you are getting pummeled by an enemy an interesting graphic effect takes over the screen creating a silvery metallic look with high bloom lighting that increases with more damage taken. Animations are well done with rag doll physics and everything moves along at a relatively solid 30 frames per second. The two problems are general art direction which seemed little inspired and at times downright archaic by recent standards and the lack of similar shader effects on the environment. It's as if HVS ran out of money or artists (perhaps both) but enemies stand out from the environment too well. The disconnect isn't a deal breaker but it's very noticeable early on in the game specifically on the Drudge drones. The final factor is multiplayer. To me, the single player campaign is nothing but basic training for the multiplayer aspect. You play the single player game to get used to the controls, the weapons, the HUD and some area layouts and when the game abruptly ends, and it does indeed abruptly end, the online multiplayer is there to greet you with open arms....melee attacking you while laughing at your inferiority. Maps range from small to big with groups of up to 12 players. You get Free-for-all, Team Reaper (deathmatch) and Team Objective (capture the flag) though with some twists to the basic concepts. ASE Football and Bounty Hunter both stand out as great additions to the traditional formulas. ASE Football is a who-can-hold-onto-the-ASE-the-longest hide and seek while Bounty Hunter has each player assigned a bounty to hunt down where killing someone other than your bounty removes points. The matchmaking options allow you to limit yourself to regional, worldwide or just your friend code swap buddies. And for the first time on Wii a First Person Shooter has full Wii Speak support but you're limited to just those on your friends list. Just as with the single player campaign, all the control tweaking, HUD arranging and button mapping fun is carried over to the multiplayer segment. Points are given out for kills and other factors such as team based wins while killing sprees grant you a point multiplier. 24 incremental ranks are awarded once predetermined point levels have been reached broken down into segments of bronze, silver, gold and skull. Unfortunately though, High Voltage Software did not include a leader board so you might be in the top 10 overall or you might be in to top 100,000; no way to know for sure. I'm also wishing for some kind of perks or incentive to increase rank much as the Call of Duty series now does. It seems a trade off The Conduit gets more maps, game modes, more players and Wii Speak but loses leader boards and incentives. In closing, The Conduit is an overall solid game from a small developer largely known for licensed titles and not new epic IPs that they fund themselves so their first effort is certainly a commendable one. The single player campaign is short, ends abruptly but trains you nicely for the multiplayer campaign which holds a lot of quality gaming to be had. I'm providing 2 scores only because I know there are 2 audiences with interest in the game. First is the score appropriated for owners of the X360 and PS3. I know there are some curious HD console owners out there who have heard for a year now how great The Conduit is supposed to be and I wish to give them a fair score based on their perspective. The second number, and the one that will be seen in the lovely graph below, will be the official score with the Nintendo Wii owning audience in mind. Few games warrant such a scoring dichotomy but The Conduit is one such game. HD console gamers, for you The Conduit is a 75. It won't provide you with anything you really haven't seen with the exception of unparalleled home console FPS controls. They really draw you in far more than any dual analog controlled FPS I've played. If you simply can't get the grips with IR and gesture control, avoid The Conduit. As for the rest of us IR loving, gesture waggling Wiigomaniacs, The Conduit has plenty to offer that redeem the cost of entry in very little time. The faults are there and you will scrutinize them as you play but only in so as much as to assess the game overall with regards to whether it even matters or not while you're having fun. Ratings |
 Select Choice Award |
|
||||||||||||||||||
