I got a fair amount of wii games this xmas, so for those of you who are considering purchasing one of these titles, I thought I would share my honest feelings about some of them. Unlike professional reviewers I don't make money if I say a game is good or get fired if I say it is bad, so maybe a truely honest opinion could be helpful.
Zack and Wiki has been heraleded by critics as the greatest game we didn't buy and while I can certainly agree that it is a good game with smarter than average writing and a unique gameplay style (if unique means totally ripping off the now ancient lucas-arts point and click adventures) it's no super mario galaxy. Heck, it's no psychonauts either. Strangely enough though, I'd still reccomend it for anyone wanting a wii game with some depth to it.
The first thing you'll notice after starting a new game is how endearing the characters are. They are quite comical, but not in an overly forced way and I can honestly say that a boy pirate who loves candy bars woking for a giant rabbit and accompanied by a flying magical monkey is a new one for me.
The second thing you'll notice is that the characters seldom speak, opting for nintendo-style text boxes and when they do speak, it's with a decidedly japaneese accent, even though these characters obviously weren't meant to be from that reigon. You'd think given the EXTREMELY limited spoken dialog in the game capcom would have sprung for some american voices when they ported it, especally considering the lip movement doesn't even match now. The third thing you'll notice is that the character's cinematic animations, while funny and quite expressive, are pretty much limited to a single, generic animation except for in the most extreme circumstances in which it's pretty much required by the story. Poor old Rose (one of the main bad guys in the game... think Jessie from team rocket in a pirate costume) spends 90% of her appearances standing and generically laughing with the same sequence of animations.
After a rather lengthy opening cutscene (get used to these, you'll have a lot down the road so I sure hope you find the interactions fun to watch) you'll finally be introduced to actual gameplay. Unfortunately for me, this is one of the major problems with the game. They give you a 3d super mario galaxy style world, often with time sensitiv enemies that you have to out-run and/or defeat via actions, but give you a point and click style interface in which to do so. Point and click controls are dead people, deal with it. I'm sure that old adventure game fans are up in arms at this point but let me explain.
Think back to maniac mansion. Now pretend there was an action you clicked on that released some monster, a monster that's running at you at a fairly rapid pace. Now obviously you have to run out of the way, but instead of actually being able to run actively, you have to passively click where you want your character to go. If the path the computer chooses for the character to use based on where you were and where you clicked has an obstacle in the way, your character gets stuck on it, and the monster catches you. Even assuming you make it to the end of the screen, the room is larger than one screen, you you have to wait for the camera to scroll, reorient your mouse, and click again all the while the monster never slowing down. You'll repeat this over and over until finally you find a place to hide. This is essentially how you'll spend at least 20% of your time in zack and wikki, basically fighting the controls and the camera to get somewhere or do something in a timely fashion, even though this is supposed to be a puzzle game!
Particularly frustrating is the way you have to drop items. You see zack walks incredibly slow when carrying something heavy and it's almost always the case that soemthing wants to attack you and you have to run away when carrying said object. So of course the solution is to drop it for now, run and get it back later. The only problem is that there isn't a dedicated drop item button. No, you have to put your cursor in the upper right hand corner and drag it out of it's container onto the ground. Yes that's right folks, enjoy the m$ windows fill up the recycle bin mini game! You'll find this particular action infuriatingly frustrating in one of the last stages of the game in which you are required to pick up an item, move to a spot, drop it and run far away in a matter of a second and a half.
The annoying thing is that these problems could have been fixed with a better control layout. The 1 button and the d-pad are completely un-used, so they could have easily been assigned to a drop button. Also those extra buttons could have been used to give a camera zoom as zooming out and seeing more of the level at one time would fix a lot of the "running away from the fast monster" issues.
Combat (or lack their of) is pretty straight forward. When you run into most enemies you shake the wiimote to ring a bell that summons wiki. (Why you have to ring a bell is beyond me as wiki follow you closely the whole time) Wiki uses his magic to turn the enemy into an item. Goons become totems (think weighted companion cube), centipedes become saws, ect. If one of these ringable enemies hits you it pretty much doesn't have any negative effect. For the most part, zack doesn't have a health bar and can't die from combat. When you can't kill an enemy via the bell you must defeat or avoid them via a puzzle. These enemies CAN kill you so you have to watch out. This part works well and there isn't much else to say about it.
Now the item interaction is fairly intuative and I don't have any problems with either. What happens is, like most adventure games, when you put your mouse over something you can interact with it changes color. Click on it and zack moves to the item and the camera zooms in, allowing you to interact with it. Click the zoomed item and a wiimote starting position is displayed, you hold the wiimote as shown and then press "A". You then interact with the item quite naturally with the wiimote acting as a switch, or dial, or lever or something more complicated. You move the item exactly as expected. There are some instances when knowing how to do the action, and actually doing it are two different things unfortunately, but these are few and far between.
Figuring out the puzzles themselves, now that's something completely different. First off, the progression of difficulty is pretty much non-existant. I found one or two of the puzzles in the very first world far more difficult than the later stages. Difficulty doesn't come from not figuring out the puzzles though (although unless you are some kind of genius, you'll get stumped at least a few times and need help) rather it comes from some of the interactions not making any sense and you having to do something rather non-sensical that you didn't think of to solve it. Case in point... Early on theres a puzzle in which you need to get into a large chest that's frozen in a block of ice. You run across a saw. Of course any sane person would know that although tiring, a saw can easily cut through ice because ice is realitively soft. Well not in this game, you manage to cut halfway though and then the saw inexplicably stops. Now call me crazy, but I don't think ice gets harder to cut the deeper you get. Regardless, you solve some more puzzles and aquire a drill... a big drill... no let's face it, a drill with a bit so gigantic you could drill for oil with it! So you go back and attack this block of ice again. The drill, like the saw, gets stuck about halfway through. Ok time to solve more puzzles and you run across a giant mallett. Sweet, there's no way the game designers would keep a giant hammer from cracking open ice. Wrong! It puts a few cracks in the block but that's about it. The solution? Well you take a icecicle, shove it in one of the holes you drilled, and bash it with the hammer until the whole thing busts apart. Now I'm pretty sure that if you take a normal sized icecicle and smash it with a hammer, even when using it as a wedge on anothr piece of ice, it'd smash into a thousand pieces. It's junk like this, and the fact that in many instances if you choose the wrong action you die, that makes certain portions of the game annoying.
With that being said, MOST of the puzzles are quite enjoyable to solve mainly due to the intersting interaction cut-scenes that occur and the creative sets. There's everything from a ice place, to a mad scientists lab, to a lava pit with a giant dragon skin that you have to walk through. Although some of the worlds are rather cliche (lava stage, ice stage, jungle stage, spooky castle and enemy base respectively) the individual levels are always creative and have interesting things to look at and interact with. Boss stages are often frustrating because they involve timed events and one wrong move and you die and have to start the whole thing over again. Again, they are giving you stages in which you have to navigate the map quickly on a frikkin point and click game!
Then there's the main plot... a main plot so childish and predictable that you'd think capcom pulled it straight from the latest sega title. You, your magical monkey friend wiki and a band of pirates called the white rabbits (because your boss is a giant rabbit, along with most of the crew) are pirates looking for treasure, but rose and her pirate crew are always competeing with you and sometimes beat you to the punch (but again, exactly like jessie from team rocket, things backfire on her she ends up "blasting off again" in the end). Early on in the game you run across a magical, talking, golden skull, who claims to be the remains of the legendary pirate Barbarose. He asks Z&W to retrieve his body parts for him, which are locked up in spiriti guarded treasure chests and offers to give them his lengedary pirate ship, the ship that was undefeated in battle as a reward. (Hmm, that sounds familiar) These body parts turn out to be golden treasure that just happens to be items that resemble human bones (spy glass for a peg-leg, candle stick holder for rips, ect...) Barbarose, who's no help at all, stays locked in a coffin with slots for all of his bones. Upon getting a treasure you are "treated" to a cut-scene with the treasure being put in the right slot with Mr. B. saying "Ooo look, the _______! It's a lot shinier than I remembered! Now I have ___ parts... not bad, keep up the good work!" Boy that was clever wasn't it? We you better think it was clever, because you'll watch that exact same scene and hear that exact same line 18 times over the course of the game! You can't skip it either. Oh and then there's the crew, or rather lack there of. Z&W are part of a pirate crew so you'd think you'd be helped and would be interacting with a wide range of characters right? Wrong! While rival pirate rose has a crew of goons at her disposal, you have a crew that with one exception never leaves the frikkin hideout! The characters are pretty well designed to, but you'll never see them in any role other than glorified shop keeper. Even your leader is never seen venturing out of the hideout.
What totally makes up for all the faults I've mentioned are the interactions with rose and her goons. The goons are cowardly and stupid and often do hilarously stupid and cowardly things. Rose is the typical Japaneese comedic villian and while she's a tad cliche and her animations are often canned, you'll find yourself chuckling at almost every scene she's in. Zack and Wiki's interactions with each other are also quite funny. In many puzzles involving heights, wiki is always fast to point out that while zack is in great danger he can fly away and he says it in such a way in which you realize that he isn't particularly concerned for his friend at all. He also tends to run away, leaving zack in his dust, when there's danger. Zack on the other hand is pretty stupid, and his stupidity gets him into trouble. Also whenever lengthy dialog pops up, he self references how boring it is, by walking off and having a snack while everyone else is talking. Honestly the only reason you want to play through this thing is to see what happens next, and while the plot is crap, the scenes making up the plot are so hilarious that you'll end up playing through just to see events unfold. Unlike other story-driven games, however, the story IS good enough to make you want to deal with all the other non-sense.
So I would say buy it, don't rent it. If you pick it up for a few minutes (or even a few hours) you are going to hate it, but if you work through the problems long enough you'll get hooked and have to finish it. So yes, it's a fun game, but you'll have to work real hard initially to find the fun.
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Topic: Zack and Wiki Impressions (Read 2300 times)
