Onslaught (Wii) Review
It’s bug squishing time. Grab your weapon of choice, a few friends, and jump online. This is no drill, this is it! You and your friends vs. an insane amount of giant insects intent on eating you alive! Welcome to Onslaught!
Onslaught is a First Person Shooter in which you play a member of a rescue team sent to a new planet just being explored. The problem: giant cybernetic bugs. What was a rescue mission quickly becomes a survival mission as you struggle to grab the few humans left and get the hell off this planet! The story has a few small twists, behind this, but really nothing you won’t see coming or be told before the game even begins. None of it matters, however, as the point of the game is the action on the ground, not how you got there.
As mentioned before, this game is a First Person Shooter, and takes it’s lessons of control from the trailblazer to get it right on the Wii, Metroid Prime 3. Although you will miss the customizability of that title, it is really not needed here, as the sensitivity feels about right from the start, and the controls are comfortable in minutes. I’d recommend opening up the online manual, but only because the game’s in-game instructions leave something to be desired, and rellying on them to know everything you need to play will leave large chunks of what you can do in-game unavailable. (In my case, I did not know I had grenades or could drive a tank till about halfway through the game.)
However, this game suffers some in general design…. mainly within the single player game. In this mode, you will have around 20 levels, all of which will be running through tunnels to get somewhere or wipe out all the bugs you can…. or defending some objective from those same bugs who will come explicitly to destroy. While running around and killing bugs can be fun as anything, it gets old quick due to the limited kinds of enemies and very repeat nature of these kinds of levels. Defend the base missions do not fair much better, since they rely on the same enemies and infuriating patters that can be next to impossible to complete on single player. Yes, you do have an AI squad to back you, however, when they can never be too much help in defenses since they will never leave formation. All you can do is tell them which direction to face.
Multiplayer is a lot better due to the ability of another player to go where they want. It also is where your score begins to play into the game… this is an arcade style shooter, and you will be competing with your other players to get the highest score in the level you choose. Sadly unless you want to play in tournament games, you are still stuck to the same 20 or so levels you played with before. But those 20 levels can be a blast to play with friends.
When this is not possible, the lack of players out there becomes a blatant point of issue in this game. Simply put from my experiences, I could not get a game in my “region” going. There were no other players to recruit into a game… a sad state of affairs for a game sold on being a multiplayer title. On the flip side of this, I was able to get a game or two across the globe, and (this will shock many WIi haters out there) I had NO connection issues! The game ran flawlessly and without lag! Even if the game is not the most popular, the networking code is rock solid.
Graphically, I have to applaud HudsonSoft. No they did not make a great looking game. At best, the game looks alright. However, this is a Wiiware title, and as such, they had a total of 40 MB to work with max. This game is graphically is on par with games that needed 10X that on PC (due to the Quake 3 engine), so despite the blatant limits in enemy types, and general resources to build levels with (almost everything is in the desert or underground) I have to say Hudson did an amazing job here. Sound is also very well done, including some limited voice acting!
Overall: If you can be sure you can have a few buddies who will get this game with you, go for it. $10 is a small price to pay for the co-op fun this game has to offer. However, if you are planning to play this game alone, I would have to tell you to pass. You will not get any unique levels, and the levels you do get will get boring fairly quick. All you will get extra is a really cheesey storyline that almost makes the story behind Starship Troopers look good (except this one is actually more straight forward).
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20 Dec 2009, 2:43 am
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