Only On: Wii
Release Date: June 23rd, 2009
Genre: First Person Shooter
Developer: High Voltage Software
Publisher: Sega
High Voltage Software is an independent game developer company that was established in 1993. Since then, they have developed a considerably large (for an independent developer) library of games. However, they have yet to put out any critically acclaimed games. Most of their games averaged in the 50 to 60 range in the review scores. Their highest rated game was All-Star Baseball 2001 on the N64 at 85%.
Is there really hope for any game that this developer puts out? The Conduit sure looks promising, but is it going to be High Voltage Software’s first critically acclaimed game?
Story
The story is a pretty basic one, that revolves around Washington D.C. and conspiracies. Prior to the start of the game, several different terrorist events have happened, such as the spread of an infectious flu-like disease, an assassination attempt on the President, and various other attacks. Amongst all of this, the protagonist, Agent Michael Ford, must fight off the Drudge as well as the humans that are under the control of them.
Michael Ford is sent out by the Trust’s leader, John Adams, to recover lost Trust technology, which is later found out to be the ASE (All-Seeing-Eye). You are lead to believe that the Drudge are under the control of Prometheus, and it is your goal to retrieve the Trust technology, and to fend off the Drudge forces.
It is a pretty run of the mill story, but the large downside is the fact that there is a complete lack of set pieces. There are no story events that happen that are at all interesting. Mostly everything related to the story takes place in between missions during long conversations. Not to mention that the very few amount of plot twists in this game can be seen from a few hundred miles away.
One thing that bugs my in a lot of games, is when they start out the game, and then flashback some time shortly after. This is the exact same thing The Conduit does. You wake up in some run down metro, and you are told to do some simple calibration and tutorial things. You then fight against some of The Grudge, and then pass through a large Conduit. This is when the flashback occurs.
What I find odd, is that this was a flashback, yet when you get back to this particular spot later in the game, 50% of the stuff that happened in the flashback doesn't happen in the actual game. Different enemy types, some different sequences, etc.
Gameplay
The gameplay is about as generic as it comes. There is nothing here that is really any different than what we have seen before several times. The basic controls are what you would expect from a Wii FPS game. A flick of the rest with the nunchuck will throw the grenade. Pointing the wiimote at the TV will obviously aim your gun, while the B button shoots. This is all pretty straight forward, and is pretty much a standard in FPS games for the Wii. However, the controls are nearly fully customizable.
One of the only great things that I can say about the Gameplay is the fully customizable controls. I do believe other Wii FPS games should always provide the amount of customizability as what is shown in The Conduit. That being said, even when you do get them to the settings you like the best, it is still going to be rather frustrating at the controls in the long run. The game seems to heavily emphasis close quarters combat by having several enemy types that charge you. Like a lot of other FPS games on the Wii, the wiimote never seems to be all that great in frantic situations where there are enemies too close to you. It works fairly well when shooting enemies at a distance, but not when so many enemies are attacking you at close range. You can do a melee attack with the swing of the remote however, but I found attempts to do this often unsuccessful, and more often than not, I ended up moving the camera in the game way too much, which often led to harder times fending off the enemies.
Throughout the game, you are traveling through extremely linear levels, fighting wave after wave of alien forces called the “Drudge’. The drudge come out of portals called “Conduits”, hence the name of the game, and they will continue to come until they are destroyed. This can become extremely frustrating at times, because of the inclusion of invisible mines. The developers decided to include invisible mines into the game, the purpose being still pretty unknown to me to this day. It didn’t do anything more than add on some time to the game. But as I was saying, it can become frustrating when there is an invisible mine in your path, and you have to deactivate it when there are continuously spawning enemies around the corner that you can’t reach. They is no way to avoid being attacked because of the long amount of time it takes to deactivate the mines. More often than not, you have to stand their and take some of the abuse from enemies while you causally disable the mine.
The ASE is an object that is so heavily wanted by your foes, but will remain with you for the entirety of the game. For the reason that your enemies want it so badly, you would think it would actually be interesting or have a wide range of functions. But no, it is a pretty bland tool that in the end, hardly adds anything to the experience. The only things that you will be doing with the ASE is uncovering elementary level puzzles on the wall, disabling locks for door, hacking into computers, disabling invisible mines, and later on in the game, revealing cloaked enemies. Practically all of these things are done with the same animations, and can be done with one button. The ASE just seems like a gimmick to add on some extra time onto the game by performing such tedious tasks in uninteresting ways.
Graphics
One of the most hyped up aspects of The Conduit back when it was first shown was the graphics. Now that the game is out, the graphics are easily a bit underwhelming. They do a lot of things right, but what drags it down is the horrible design that for the most part, completely distract you away from the things they did right. Looking past that, the game has some impressive textures for a Wii game, as well as some decent lighting and particles. On a technical stand point, The Conduit really isn’t all that bad at all. In fact, it is probably one of the best technical looking games on the Wii. However, it isn’t something that is all that appealing with the bland way that they put everything together. An impressive Wii graphics engine alone will not make the game look great.
While most of the issues pertain to the actual presentation, I will say that in graphics alone, The Conduit is pretty good, but there are quite a few other games that are much more appealing.
Presentation
As touched on in the graphics section, the presentation for this game is probably its worst aspect of the game. The levels, weapons, and enemy design are some of the most bland things that I have seen in recent history. The level design will never warrant the player stopping and admiring the scenery, since there really is nothing to look at. There is nothing that catches the eye, as it all just looks like another bland office building.
The weapons themselves are always pretty dull. The human weapons are ones that you would expect, such as submachine guns and assault rifles, but the Drudge weapons are completely lacking, although these are the weapons that should be interesting. There was not much variety between them. The only differences were the different rates of fire, but they all felt like the same. They generally looked the same as well. The Drudge weapons are very insect like in appearance, and they use orange orbs for their ammo supply.
Most of the story is presented through uninteresting screens of text with bad voice acting in between missions. There is some sequences in-game that add to the story, but otherwise, it will all be between missions with fairly long conversations. This fails to engage the player, especially considering the story isn’t any good to begin with. This also breaks up the game too much. It never feels like a connected experience, but a broken up one where you just do these different missions one at a time. So not only are the walls of text non-engaging, it really hurts the pacing of the game.
Lasting Appeal
Although I mentioned several times that some of the poor design choices did nothing but add time onto the game, the game still ended up being probably the shortest game that I have played this generation. There are some games I could probably beat quicker on speed runs, but The Conduit was easily the fastest I beat a game on my first play through. When I was finished, after the 2nd day of playing it, I was wondering how long I actually played it, because it felt like no more than a couple hours. I checked the Wii messages that say how long you played a game, and yes….I beat the game in 3 hours and 30 minutes. Are you serious? There is no reason why a game should be this short. If I ended up paying full price for this game, I would fell 100% ripped off. I wasn’t even purposely rushing through it. Yes I didn’t go and try and find all of the collectible, but a game should not rely on uninteresting collectibles to add hours onto their game. The game itself was way too short.
Luckily though, there is a multiplayer feature, which should give you some enjoyment, right? Well, sort of. The multiplayer goes back to the basics. It feels more like the games we used to love back on the N64 days like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. It is essentially just a straight up frag fest, but has some different game modes. A lot of them are pretty run of the mill, but one in particular stood out. It is called Bounty Hunter. This is where each player is assigned a target, and they must go kill the target. Each person gets a different target, but if you kill someone that is not your target, you lost points. It is a pretty neat concept, and is executed fairly well in the game.
Although the online mode seems to be relatively solid, most players are not going to stick around for long. It couldn’t have been any longer than 2 days after the release of the game until people began to cheat. I encountered several people with infinite ammo and health. With being on a system that limits the potential of online capabilities, something like cheaters can effectively destroy the community, and I have a feeling it won’t be long until the community is nearly gone for The Conduit.
Overall, you won’t get much replay value. The game is extremely short, and doesn’t have really any incentive to play through it again, and the online play is already marred by a lot of cheaters. Do yourself a favor and give this game a rent at max.
Overall
The Conduit brings nearly nothing new to the table, while bringing an extremely short and unfulfilling campaign mode. The length of this game alone does not warrant a purchase, especially considering the already broken online play.
The only thing preventing this game from getting, probably a low 5, from me would be the customizable controls.
Positives:
Control customizability is great
An alright amount of variety in enemies
Negatives:
Repetitious
Poor pacing
Invisible mines add nothing to the game but frustration. Poor design choice.
Broken online system
A complete lack of set-pieces
A fairly uninteresting story
Very bland art style and level design
Way too short
Bad voice acting
Story: 6.0
Gameplay: 6.5
Presentation : 4.5
Graphics: 7.5
Lasting Appeal: 5.5
Overall: 6.0 
