Rating of
4/5
His name's "Gene McQuick"... get it?
Jonzor - wrote on 01/09/12
Meet the game that matches World of Goo stride-for-stride as the best original title to appear as downloadable content on the Nintendo Wii.
Like cream cheese on pizza, this game is a combination that's hard to grasp until you sit down and give it a try. The best I can do is to tell you to imagine a mix of Excitebike and Little Big Planet.
That is to say, it's a 2D, physics-enhanced, racing game with a heavy dose of exploration.
Each level (of which there are 100+ according to the game's website) is a fairly short, but fairly complicated race to touch the checkered orb. Whether you're racing a ghost of another racer, another actual car, a giant bug chasing you, or rising slime depends on the level.
And the racing takes a little getting used to. Here is where the biggest Excitebike influence comes in. Keeping your truck's wheels parallel to the ground to maintain top speed is a skill you'll need to master quickly if you're going to have any hope of winning the race and unlocking the next track. A staggering amount of ramps, loops, elevators, cages, and other obstacles will keep you flipping your truck constantly as you race (sometimes backwards) through the courses. This was my favorite part of the game, as driving into a loop that flips and throws your truck into the opposite direction, righting the truck in mid-air, sticking the landing, and hitting reverse to speed off in the other direction as you progress through the course feels pretty satisfying once you've gotten the hang of the controls.
But beware. Every once in a while you'll run into a level that'll just drive you mad. This is especially true towards the end. There's an opportunity for some really punishing difficulty in this game, and every once in a while it'll rear its ugly head. On the whole however, the difficulty curve progresses quite nicely.
Winning a race unlocks a gold medal ghost for the level. This ghost takes a nearly flawless path to the end, which is all the more impressive as you get into the game, and beating it to obtain "gold" for the track can often be quite an undertaking.
But each level isn't merely just a race to the finish. Every course will contain a number of coins for you to collect. You'll be told how many there are, and finding each of them takes an awful lot of not caring about winning and a lot more watching where your jumps will take you. The coins can be spent to buy new cars (only useable in multiplayer, sorry...).
Aside from the coins, there are two blue orbs hidden in each level. These can often be EXTREMELY hard to find, and involve finding ways to create your own jumps, using items in unorthodox ways, and plain old poking around the level to find. Finding each orb will be more for completionists than anything else, but in truth you wouldn't be really experiencing the game that you paid for if you didn't go through the motions finding orbs. A HUGE amount of the brilliant and varied level design and physics-related puzzles become clear as you stare at the screen trying to imagine a way to launch yourself up onto some ledge you believe hides an orb.
The graphics for the game are pretty great. It's a 2D game, so there's only so much that can be shown, but they're bright and clear. They have a light-hearted and cartoonish design to them that I really enjoyed. They weren't anything especially original, but they were very well done.
The hidden gems in the game - a hidden gem in and of itself - are the music and writing. There's not a lot of writing or dialog, but it's usually brief and witty, which ensures it's essentially always a welcome surprise, then gets out of your way.
And the music is just fantastic. There's not much more to say. Like 10% of the way into the game I was already sold. You don't often hear it for extended periods of time because levels last usually 1-2 minutes, but I just never got tired of it. And on the subject of sound, the scream your character lets out as he falls down a bottomless pit was pretty funny.
The online play is relegated to leaderboards, essentially just comparing times with people around the globe, but even that's above-average for Nintendo games, so we can't complain too much.
I haven't had a chance to do actual local multiplayer, but there are a few races in the story with 4 competitors, and it's absolute chaos. Cars constantly running into each other, flipping each other over, landing on each other... chaos. I imagine it would be hilarious and pretty fun for 20-30 minutes, but I don't know that it would ever grow some legs and develop into a deep mutliplayer experience. Basically I'm saying I'd love to try it, but I don't imagine it replacing Smash Bros and Mario Kart as the go-to Wii multiplayer mains.
For the money, this game is a steal. The game has been polished to a mirror shine. There's TONS of levels, great presentation, tight controls, and a smattering of good writing. If you've got some Wii Points to offload (and even if you don't) and want to spend them on something OTHER than a ported Nintendo game for a change, you owe it to yourself to get this.
