Review: The Conduit

For a platform that seems perfect for first-person shooters, the Wii lacks any good ones. Other than Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and arguably Medal of Honor Heroes 2, exclusive or even decent first person shooters are absent on the Wii. When High Voltage Software revealed The Conduit for the first time, it was no surprise that it would receive a lot of attention. After all, it is one of the only exclusive Wii shooters built ground up for the system, and it actually looks fun at first glance. It includes online multiplayer and even voice chat through WiiSpeak support; what more could a Wii owner ask for? Unfortunately, The Conduit suffers from a lack of an entertaining single player experience despite its excellent controls.

You play as Michael Ford, an agent for a secret government organization called “The Trust”. He is tasked with the elimination of a terrorist named Prometheus and the retrieval of a top secret government piece of equipment called the All-Seeing Eye. Along the way you’ll encounter aliens and get hit with a plot twist that completely changes your goal for the rest of the game. It’s basically some sci-fi conspiracy mumbo jumbo riddled with clichés and boring voice acting that you won’t care about. In this day and age, it’s difficult to be completely original, but it’s laughable how lame the story becomes. The MGS codec-like sequences between levels can be skipped if you wish to simply move on.

Before discussing the gameplay, I have to take a moment to praise the controls. The Conduit has by far the best first-person shooter controls on a console and the greatest degree of customization in regards to your controls. The Wii remote is used as the camera, employing the bounding box method of Metroid Prime 3 and a few other shooters. The nunchuk’s control stick moves your character, and motion sensing capabilities are utilized through thrusting the nunchuk or Wii remote to throw a grenade or melee, respectively. Every other action can be mapped to any button, but even the default configuration feels perfect. Customization doesn’t merely apply to what buttons you press; you can change the horizontal and vertical sensitivities, dead zone, running speed, turn speed, bounding box boundaries, reload blur… and a bit more. Your preferences will be applied in real-time, so you can quickly go back and revert to previous settings or tweak them again. Perhaps the only frustrations are the disorientation from a melee attack (since you thrust the Wii remote forward, it throws off your aiming) and accidental grenade tosses (which have led to a few suicides).

It’s a bit disappointing that after a few hours of playtime, you realize that the game will probably never deviate from its shoot-everything gameplay. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in today’s market of shooters, The Conduit feels rather lacking. The game is short, linear, and simple. You’ll trudge along clearing every room of its enemies, solving effortless puzzles with the All-Seeing Eye, and picking up health and ammo every few feet you traverse. Other than the hidden messages you can decrypt with the A.S.E., the radio transmissions placed in levels that provide a little more to the story, and the “powerful” weapons you obtain, there isn’t much more besides gunning down every character you see. The A.S.E.’s message scanning feels rather tacked on, even though it’s supposed to be a major aspect of the gameplay and the story.

Although you fight in many locations in Washington D.C., such as the JFK Airport and the White House, the levels aren’t very imaginative. They all look very drab and indistinctive, the level design is repetitive and boring like Halo‘s, and the firefights are uninspired and more of the same each time. The same enemies are thrown at you each time though; the primary increase in difficulty will be additional enemies that you have to kill. You will not see a boss battle or a memorable battle like the end of “One Shot, One Kill” in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

The levels may look boring, but from a technical standpoint, The Conduit runs quite well. The graphics engine, which was custom built for the Wii, is able to churn out bump mapping, consistent frame rates, and pretty special effects like depth of field that may leave some surprised that the Wii is able to output these visuals. Despite the technical accomplishment, the art pales in comparison with all-too-often repeating textures and character models and bland character and level design.

There is no local split-screen multiplayer, but there is an online component with voice chat support via WiiSpeak. Twelve players can play in deathmatch, team deathmatch, or team objective modes with several maps and weapon configurations available to choose through voting among the players. Matchmaking is done fairly well here, but the team game modes suffer slightly because WiiSpeak is only available between players that have exchanged friend codes. And then again, I don’t have the WiiSpeak peripheral, so I wasn’t able to test it out in my review. Lag and other typical online annoyances exist, but nothing to really hamper the experience too much. Overall the multiplayer portion of The Conduit is fun even though it too suffers from the same level design problems of the single player.

It’s difficult to say if The Conduit should be recommended or not. On one hand you have superb controls and an online multiplayer component on par with shooters on the 360 and PS3. On the other hand you have a shallow, yet still somewhat fun single player campaign and uninspired game design that leaves you feeling that The Conduit is wasted potential. We can only hope that Wii developers take The Conduit‘s strengths and apply them to their own shooters.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - For a Wii title, visuals are amazing. - The customization of the controls is unmatched. - Online multiplayer is mostly smooth sailing, from match setup to the match itself.	Doin’ It RONG: - The art is boring, uninspired, and bland. - The single player component needs a lot of work in making it a consistently fun experience. - The Conduit’s plot is clichéd and the voice acting is lame.
FINAL SCORE: 6 / 10