The Conduit Review

Written by: Steve Martin Posted: 28th July 2009

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FPS action comes to the Wii.

The Conduit Details:

	First Person Shooter
	Nintendo Wii
	High Voltage Software
	Sega

16+

Out Now

There has been a lot of hype about The Conduit, it has been touted as the ultimate FPS for the Wii, a genre that should be perfectly suited to the Wii's unique control system. Yet, there is a distinct lack of FPS titles so far, a handful at best and all of them are older games. So, can The Conduit live up to the hype, and show everyone that the Wii can handle FPS games better than the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (aka the FPS-fan favourite)?

The game sees you take on the role of Michael Ford, a member of the President’s Secret Service, who is selected to join the ranks of the secret government agency known as The Trust, your mission is to track down Prometheus, a former Trust operative who has stolen important technology. The storyline involves the usual Sci-Fi clinches such as government conspiracies, secret organisations and of course an alien invasion from the Drudge.

There is a vast amount of weaponry for you to use in your missions, but these are split into three types, human, Trust and Drudge weapons. The Drudge weaponry is the probably the best of the lot, but some weapons seem very weak and useless, especially later on in the game. As well as the futuristic weapons, you also have access to the All Seeing Eye, or ASE for short, which allows you to find hidden markings and objects, it is also used to hack electronic systems. You use it to open biological locks on doors, by finding the hidden nodes in a room, it is also used to detect ghost mines and destroy them. Using the ASE is very straight-forward and feels rather uninspired. There are also some hidden messages and relics that open up hidden areas that contain ammo, health and weaponry, but these are also easy to spot because the ASE beeps whenever you get near to something, which saves you the hassle of having to work out when you need to use it!

The missions are fairly standard, and require no real brainpower, this is a shoot-anything-that-moves FPS and proud of it. Your mission objectives usually centre on killing all the enemies, or destroying the conduits they are coming out of. The enemies you encounter obviously get tougher as the game goes on, towards the end the Drudge are just “bullet sponges” requiring an obscene amount of ammunition to take them down! This can be very frustrating, especially when coupled with the long reloading times of most weapons! This will cause you to see the mission failed screen quite often, but if you stick with it then it is possible to kill them. The single player mode feels unimaginative with no spectacular set-pieces or locations to run through, meaning that it all feels very linear and limited. Most levels are just corridors and rooms with a few venturing outside, these are the better levels and the game suddenly feels much more open. The single player mode is quite short with a limited number of missions, although each mission does last a considerable amount of time to compensate. The story seems quite clichéd and isn’t told very well, as it is mostly through the pre-mission briefings as opposed to cut-scenes or set-pieces during the games missions.

In my opinion the default control system isn’t mapped very well, the game requires the use of all the buttons including the plus and minus and with the default settings reload is mapped to the tiny minus button! The Wii-mote is obviously your crosshair control and the nunchuck moves your player, a flick of the nunchuck throws a grenade. Moving the crosshair to one side of the screen turns your view, however Ford turns far too slowly, and moving the pointer too quickly to one side causes him to stop turning completely. Thankfully, the controls are fully customisable as is the turning zone, which helps to combat these problems.

Take the game online and you’ll find it a lot more rewarding it is great fun to play, and doesn’t take long to get used to. There can be a bit of lag which means that you may end up shooting thin air rather than the guy who was in that spot a second ago, but mainly it runs smoothly and allows you to enjoy some of the weaponry that proved useless against the Drudge.

Graphically it is pretty good, the enemy animation is smooth if a little limited and the blurring effect as you reload is quite cool, but overall it is not as good as I would have hoped and compared to similar games (Red Steel and Metroid) it lacks detail. There is next to nothing to interact with in your surroundings, bar a few explosive barrels and the objects that are detected by your ASE. The level design is particularly bad and very bland. Most levels consist of a series of corridors and rooms that begin to look very similar after a while. The Drudge is also unimaginatively designed and is devoid of personality, their name is quite fitting actually!

The music is suitably chosen, with a high tempo synthesised score for the action sections, and the voice acting is acceptable even if the script is a little dull. Sound effects are well done with some good, meaty gun noises to enjoy.

This game promised so much but for me it failed to deliver overall. Dull and repetitive objectives and a lacklustre story combined with some unfair and inconsistent AI makes the short single player mode an uninspired stroll through corridor filled levels. Also the ASE elements seem forced in, rather than integral to the gameplay. Remove the AI and take the game online and you’ll find that there is a good FPS engine and rediscover the joy of playing the game. This just does not live up to the expectations it set itself, which is a real shame as it is great to see a proper serious shoot-‘em up on this platform, hopefully it’ll pave the way for similar titles with more inspiration in the campaign mode.