This review sounds negative so far, but I’m just letting that all out at the beginning. There’s plenty to love about The Conduit that redeems all of the above (t0 a degree) and adds to the few high points I have mentioned. Let’s start small, with the achievement system. You get achievements for finishing levels and finding all of the hidden messages and data discs scattered throughout levels. There are also achievements for total kills, kills of specific enemies, and kills with specific weapons, which means that if you want to get all of them, you are going to play through the campaign often. There are five difficulties, and despite the run-and-gun play, the AI gets legitimately hard as you crank that option.
One thing I have not mentioned at all yet are the controls. These are flat out the best controls you have ever used for a first-person shooter on a console, and that’s because you can customize them to do whatever you want. Think your dead zone for turning is too big? Make it tiny so your reticule is always in the center of the screen in the direction you are looking in. Accidentally throwing grenades everytime you use your Nunchuk hand to scratch your nose? Turn down the sensitivity on the Nunchuk motion. Think you aren’t running or turning fast enough? You can adjust that too. There are no presets besides the working original, but you can tweak to you heart’s content, and in real-time to boot, so you don’t have to jump back and forth to tweak and test over and over.
You can also customize where objects are on the heads-up display and what buttons and motions do what, which all in all gives The Conduit the most customization of any console game, putting it in league with many PC titles as far as both controls and HUD options go. That is the most impressive thing about The Conduit, and I hope that other developers copy High Voltage Software endlessly in that regard.
These controls also give The Conduit the best first-person shooter multiplayer on the system. Everyone has the potential to be deadly accurate due to these controls, so your skill and your ability to tweak these controls to your benefit is a must. It makes for some very intense multiplayer matches, as you can easily, from a distance, hit people effectively with pistols and shotguns, never mind the fantastic Drudge and Trust weaponry that are stuffed full of lasers and charged shots.
There are multiple game modes for The Conduit’s multiplayer, and they are all fun. You have your standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes along with a capture the flag mode, but there are plenty of wrinkles that make this worth playing long-term. There’s a “Three Strikes” mode where you have just three lives during the match, and “Bounty Hunter” where you hunt down a specific target, and lose points for killing the wrong person. ASE Football is like the briefcase mode from Perfect Dark, where you hold the ASE as long as you can without dying to win. You can also play Three Strikes in teams, pulling lives from a pool. Multiplayer supports 12 players and Wii Speak; it’s the first third-party game to do so. You can play with strangers or with friends, and though the initial connection and authorization with strangers takes a little time, the matches afterward start up quick. The Conduit also has a ranking system with 24 ranks, and you earn experience to move up in rank as you collect kills and win matches. Kill sprees give you experience multipliers as well, so you will be rewarded for skill as well as constantly playing. You can also customize which weapon sets and maps you will play on, and given the variety in human, Trust and Drudge weaponry, you won’t get bored with your options anytime soon. Multiplayer is the reason to own The Conduit, and you will play it for months and months once you start.
Blast Factor: While the single-player campaign is lacking in innovation and plays out as occasionally bland, the game is impressive with its graphics (for the most part) and brings unprecedented control to first-person shooters on a console. Multiplayer is the reason to own The Conduit, but there’s still hope for improved sequels in regards to single player given the few things that do work for it. There’s enough to love about the game that purchasing it should be a non-issue for shooter fans on the Wii.
The Conduit is available exclusively for the Nintendo Wii and has a suggested retail price of $49.99
“Occasionally the sky also looks terrible, particularly when the clouds have an orange hue to them.”
You need to listen to the radio and TV broadcasts in the game; the weird-looking sky is part of the backstory.
I get that it’s supposed to be orange and ominous, that’s not the problem. The problem is that it looks like someone zoomed in on cloud sprites and then made all of the textures muddy. The “looks terrible” refers to the sky graphically, not it’s color or appearance.