The Mystery Of Whiterock Castle (Wii) Review
BrutalGamer.com’s review of The Mystery Of Whiterock Castle.
» Nintendo Wii Reviews
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).
World of Goo (Wii) Review
Be ready to be three years old again, when goo is disgusting, and yet alot more fun then it has every right to be…. only you mom wont tell you to stop playing in the mud this time. Instead, it’s time to delve into a strange world where the goo is alive, able to build structures with surprising strength for non-solids, and brains will count for far more then brawn (and about as much as reflexes).
The story behind World of Goo is as murky as your living building blocks at best. What starts as living goo beginning to explore the world around them quickly becomes a convoluted story about a company named after them, which for reasons that do not even begin to make sense, you will ultimately destroy. Seriously, I don’t even know if this qualifies as a spoiler since the whole thing makes so little sense. However, seeing how little the story matters to the game, this is hardly an issue.
The game itself is a puzzle game based on physics. You will build structures out of goo-balls with the goal of getting the goo flowing around it to the pipe at the end of the level, doing so with the instinctive ease of pointing your wiimote at your choice goo-ball and holding down A to pick it up and drag it wherever you want before letting go of the button, and dropping the ball. Using all the different kinds of good available (and each will be introduced by the game, so I will not try to explain them here), you will have somewhere around 40 levels to complete: Some easy, some hard, and some “are you ****ing kidding me” hard. You will have fun, but be STINGY with your skips (the game does let you skip 3 levels for every chapter you complete (there are 4)) to prevent some more hair-pulling events later.
The music to this game is simply amazing…. and for once, I can tell you not to take my word for it! It’s being given away for free! Go take a listen at fileplanet and hear this awesome masterpiece for yourself. As for sounds in general, there are not a lot to go around. There are generic pucker sounds for when you move goo around and they sometimes squeal as you manipulate them, as well as some popping, burning, and bursting, but nothing that will really draw your attention.
Graphically, this game is very simple. A blatantly flat and stylized set of graphics will meet your eyes and remind you in an odd way of things like Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas, if not a lot less technically impressive. It looks very nice and has a charm all it’s own, but it was never going to win any awards since once the charm wears off, there is nothing really special remaining.
FINAL VERDICT: If you enjoy puzzle games, go download this on the shopping channel. This game is also on the PC (with Mac and Linux also available now), but do not let that fool you. 2D Boy themselves have said both versions are the same exact game. The only differences I could find are you can have a player 2, 3, or even 4 on the Wii if you want, but in return you lose the leaderboards for the individual levels the PC version has. Add that to this version being $10 instead of $20, and there should be no reason not to pick this excellent title for your digital Wii library.
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