The Conduit Review

There's nothing terribly wrong with The Conduit. You can move around, shoot things, and collect stuff. If the Wii is the only platform available to you, The Conduit is an acceptable FPS. Those of us who have spent any time with the genre since the turn of the millennium have no reason to pick this up.

A dozen or so hours of banal conspiracy story about shadowy government agencies and what may or may not be an alien invasion comprises The Conduit's single-player game. For the vast majority of the campaign, you slog through corridor after hallway, blasting away at simpletons. Some moments of solid design are sprinkled amid the monotony, like fending off constantly spawning enemies while trying to download critical data in a secret White House situation room. For the most part, though, the single-player mode is little more than a thinly disguised sequence of arenas whose doors magically unlock after you've cleared the area of hostiles.

Online play works better than I expected on the Wii, which is to say that it's slightly better than what PC gamers had circa 1998. Matchmaking works well enough, and latency issues are present but not catastrophic. An interesting take on free-for-all deathmatching, dubbed Bounty Hunter mode, subtly changes the game by only scoring points for players who have wronged you in the past, giving you an onscreen objective arrow to the current location of your most bitter foe. Beyond that, the old standbys like capture-the-flag and team deathmatch round out a capable online experience.

The Conduit's bright spot is its inventive weaponry. Several firearms can be charged up for alternate attacks, and slight tweaks to familiar weapons, like the ammo-friendly grenade launcher, make the arsenal fresh and fun to employ. Particularly in multiplayer, the array of armaments creates a great gameplay dynamic.

The interface has been The Conduit's biggest question mark, and the answer is decidedly mixed. Aiming is mediocre without being heinous. Tracking the slow-moving AI enemies isn't much of a problem, but drawing a bead on a human opponent is tough even with the game's ploddingly slow movement speed. That said, it's not impossible to get used to, and I'm certain the scheme will have its defenders as players spend time with it.

The larger problem is the poor secondary button placement on the Wii remote. It's difficult to use the d-pad without drunkenly jerking your view around, and you end up with common actions assigned to those buttons no matter how you configure the controls. I applaud the broad leeway High Voltage allows players in customizing The Conduit's interface, but no amount of clever programming can fix the way Nintendo designed the Wii remote.

There's not much to hate about The Conduit outside of some lamentably uninspired design decisions. There isn't much to love, either. It feels like a 10-year-old game at times, albeit a reasonably polished one. It's on Wii, though, and that will be enough for some people.