Here we have a game I've been eagerly following for a while and had high expectations for.
The premise is simple - run around and shoot everything that moves. Such a basic and time-tested formula, what could possibly go wrong? Well you came to the right place because this game gives you plenty of answers to that question.
First, let me be clear that I am no graphics whore. But make no mistake, this is an UGLY game. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that we've been playing in HD on the 360, but when a Wii game looks like a PSX/Saturn game, that is unacceptable. This has nothing to do with 480P. The graphics just suck like a hippie siphoning gas for his lime-green bug. I've heard people say that this game was originally designed on the PSP and then ported to the Wii - and it is apparent they didn't bother to up the graphics much in the conversion.
Sound is barely competent. I mean, it just somehow manages to be just mildly irritating for the most part. This goes for effects and music.
Control is a mixed bag. The one place where this game shines is the Wii controls for shooting. They are quite good. You move with the left nunchuk stick and the quadrant of the screen where you point the Wiimote is the direction you shoot in. This makes for great mobile firefighting in all directions. You can strafe and dodge while keeping fire on any targets fairly easily once you get the hang of it. It felt sort of like the old school Smash TV game. This was the very best part of the game, and shooting was actually pretty fun until either A) you ran out of ammo or B) you got bored to death from the terribleness of every other aspect of the game. Tough call on which will happen first, ammo runs out pretty fast. I'm going to have to vote B though. Also note that 90% of the game occurs in narrow corridors, so the whole benefit of great mobility becomes moot.
Oh, I mentioned it was a mixed bag because the camera controls blew chunks. You move the camera by tilting the nunchuk left or right. But it felt like it was on some kind of random multiplier on how sensitive it wanted to be. Sometimes you couldn't get hardly any response at all until you tilted it like 135 degrees, other times it would spin around with minimal movement.
So you might think to yourself: "Well, the gameplay is the most important, so I should still get some enjoyment out of this game despite the horrible graphics, sound, and camera issues. After all, it has COOP!" I know, I tried so very hard to justify this to myself to play it more so I can give this game a decent review. But despite what it had going for it in the controls and coop department, the other aspects of gameplay nullify any and all enjoyment.
First, the entire inventory system is a horrible, unintuitive mess. There really is no other way to describe it. You have to manage ammo and equipment (ammo runs out fast due to the fact that enemies respawn all the time, take too many hits to kill, and there is separate ammo for each type of weapon). Yeah, it's great to be a sniper when your ammo runs out after the first 20 enemies and you have to rely on weak melee because all that's been dropping is flamethrower ammo, which you don't have the skill to use (fun!). You got to go through multiple menu screens to even get to where you can look at your equipment and maybe swap out weapons. Hey, fantastic, let me just tell the other folks playing to take a bio break while I try to equip something. The melee system is terrible, by the way.
As if that doesn't interrupt the game enough, there are also stupid (really bad) minigames that you need to play to open up chests and do upgrades. Oh, and only the person activating it can do the minigame. Stuff like this just totally breaks into the action and just kind of leaves you with a "What were they thinking?" impression.
Let me just sum this up because there's not a whole lot more to say. This game is a travesty. It took an easy formula, tried to make it complicated and executed it poorly. The overall presentation and quality of work is an unrelenting failure. It's like a rough demo brought to a company for them to buy into it and make an actual presentable game out of, but they just decided to release it to market. It just doesn't make any sense how a game like this can be made and then published by Sega in this day and age. Do the industry a favor and don't buy this one. Let it die and hope that this is a lesson learned. And pray that the execs have enough brains to understand that it failed not because it was a coop action shooter, but because it was just a terrible mess of a game that should have never been released in this condition.
On the general scale, this game gets a
5.0 (of 10). It most certainly could have been worse, but it's definitely not good.
On the coop scale, this game gets a
4.5. Here's the sad thing - this game is actually better to play in single player due to many of the issues mentioned above as well as other problems that arise from multiplayer (camera problems, inventory management, and screen mobility to name a few). This is a sad day in Coopgamerland, the very first game reviewed to receive a lesser score from having coop. I hope I never see this again because coop should always be used for good, not evil.
