E3 Disclaimer: Kombo’s E3 previews are designed to inform you of what each game at E3 plays like, and what we think of what’s shown. These previews are not reviews, and we reserve final judgment of each game until it is finished and released. These previews offer an honest opinion of what a publisher chose to demo at E3. So, without further ado, read on.
What the Game’s About
For any Wii owner, this is the game with “teh ossum gr4ph1x” that everybody’s talking about. In The Conduit, you assume the role of mysterious badass Mr. Ford, an agent working for a secret service organization known as Trust. After Washington D.C. is attacked by an insect-like alien race dubbed the “Drudge,” it becomes your mission to investigate the attack and discover the truth behind the entire situation. Equipped with a slew of weapons spanning the three separate factions and an interesting device known as the All-Seeing Eye, Mr. Ford is on the case.
What’s Hot
I can’t begin this section without stating the obvious: holy crap, does this game look good. Hands down, The Conduit has to be the sharpest looking Wii game I’ve ever seen. Screenshots just don’t do it justice – you have to see it in motion. At one point, High Voltage stated that they wanted to make a game on the Wii that looked like one on the 360, and they’ve definitely achieved that goal.
Graphics aside, The Conduit really has a lot going for it. One key idea that the developers focused on in the game is the ability to customize. The Conduit allows you to fully map the controls on the Wii remote and nunchuck, alter the size of the dead zone (the box in the center of the screen where the camera doesn’t move even if you move the cursor), change the movement speed of the camera, and you can even edit the walking speed of your character. Wow. For this reason, going into detail about the controls would be somewhat of a moot point, but I’ll mention that even the default controls are laid out logically and comfortably.
The weapon selection in The Conduit is nicely varied as well. The demo I played started you out with a standard pistol and a machine gun that fires in bursts. The pistol’s rapid-fire action sold me from the start, but I also grew to love the power of the machine gun soon enough. On top of these, you’re able to pick up weapons from Drudge enemies. The only weapon I tried of this kind was a rifle that shot plasma-esque bullets. Holding down the shoot button with this weapon charges the shot for an even more devastating attack. Doing so doesn’t deplete your ammo at a faster rate, but the developers have said that the game is still going through balancing tests, so this may change in the final build.
The fourth weapon that I tried was a Trust weapon that had a cool little quirk to it. Quickly pressing the shoot button fires normal-sized shots, but as you begin to charge up a shot, the aiming reticule morphs into three side-by-side reticules, and what you end up shooting out is what looks like a blue cord of sorts. What makes this weapon so cool? Well, if you manage to hit an enemy with one side of the cord, the other side begins to wrap around the enemy until both ends touch, causing a nice little blue explosion. So satisfying. Grenade selection includes standard grenades, these other grenades that continue to explode in a small spot for a few seconds, and flashbangs that can stun enemies.
Lastly, the All-Seeing Eye helps bring a minor puzzle aspect to The Conduit’s intense shooting action. The All-Seeing Eye (or ASE for short) is this round device that can detect objects that are normally invisible. The two examples of this that I saw were ASE puzzles and cloaked mines. ASE puzzles are these invisible pictures on certain walls that guard Trust areas. The object of the puzzles is to rotate the three circular lines around a picture of the ASE so that they line up perfectly, giving you access to secret ammo rooms and the like. The other instance occurred near the end of the level in a sewer area. You use the ASE to make these invisible hovering mines appear long enough for you to shoot them. Fun stuff.
What’s Not
I really don’t have many complaints about what I’ve played from the game. Everything seems ridiculously solid aside from some mid-development bugs that’ll probably be worked out of the final build. There are a few things that should be mentioned, though.
To start, throwing grenades accurately takes a good bit of practice. On the default control scheme (and I’m not even sure if this is changeable or not), you flick the nunchuck forward to lob a grenade. The problem is that there’s a lot of power in the throw, so unless you directly hit an enemy with the grenade (which is supposed to be done by aiming at the enemy with the reticule), chances are you’re going to overshoot your target by quite a bit.
My second gripe feels like it’s a little hard to explain. Basically, getting hit or hitting others in The Conduit just doesn’t pack enough of a punch. There’s too little of an indication – both visually and aurally – that you’re either being shot or are hitting the person you’re shooting at. This can get troublesome as you end up accidentally wasting bullets barraging an enemy with shots when all he needed was just one to send him over to the other side or, even worse, you discover that you’re low on health a little too late just as a huge attack is coming towards you. This is especially plausible because of how easily the health bar can sometimes blend in with the rest of the game. A little warning would be nice.
Finally, this last point isn’t so much a negative one as it is an interesting and different one. Oddly enough, the game features no vertical scrolling whatsoever. This doesn’t actually become much of a problem as any aerial enemies are met from a far enough distance to be taken care of easily and I personally thing that the decision to make the game simply have horizontal scrolling adds to the stability of the controls, but many may find this to be restrictive and will probably end up on people’s list of bad things about the game.
Outlook
Bottom line, The Conduit is an impressively solid FPS, and we all know that the Wii is more than lacking in those. The graphics are gorgeous compared to a lot of the stuff that has seen the light of day on the Wii, the gameplay is fast-paced and fun, and the story’s intriguing if you’re into the whole sci-fi thing. If you’re a Wii owner with a craving for a good FPS, put down The Conduit as a must buy when it comes out (hopefully) in Q1 2009.
