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Forums - Nintendo - Jeff Gerstmann reviews The Conduit (40%)

http://www.giantbomb.com/the-conduit/61-21121/reviews/

The Conduit is slow-moving first-person shooter with a flat story and dull enemies. Considering first-person shooters seem to be getting released at the rate of one or two a month, you'd think there wouldn't be room for a game that doesn't come close to meeting the standards of the genre. But The Conduit carves out a decent niche by being one of the few games that take place from this perspective and were developed solely for the Wii. As a Wii-only release, The Conduit is kind of neat and certainly unique. But it's more interesting for the way it uses a Wii Remote and Nunchuk than it is as an actual game.

The game's story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn't really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to a conduit, and then shutting it with a grenade. You'll also have to pull out the all-seeing eye, a glowing orb that acts as your primary way to interact with computers and as a beam that reveals hidden objects in the world. Sometimes you'll use this to unlock doors that block your forward progress. Other times, you'll use it to open up secret pathways to additional weaponry, disarm normally invisible mines, and so on.
You can hold two weapons at once, and you'll encounter weapons from different factions, including secret high-tech energy weapons, alien rifles, and regular human technology. You'll also grab a lot of grenades... seriously, sometimes it seems like every single enemy has a grenade on their corpse. You toss grenades by shaking the Nunchuk, which isn't always as responsive as you'd want.
Playing The Conduit requires a Wii Remote and a Nunchuk. The control is pretty intuitive, but it takes time to get used to aiming and turning by pointing at the screen. I probably fumbled around with the aiming control for around half an hour before I started getting comfortable. The game offers a lot of different sliders and options for tweaking the control, but I ended up leaving it alone in the end. The more I changed things, the worse the control felt. But even once you get the hang of the controls, it all feels a little delicate. The lock-on targeting jerks your view around, which can be disorienting. The turning radius never feels quite right and makes the game seem sluggish. In fact, all of the movement feels deliberately slower than the average shooter. But the game seems like it was built with that in mind, as it's a fairly low-impact experience overall. The instances where it gets more hectic quickly became my least favorite parts of the game, since that's when the game's control wasn't up to the task at hand.
You can open fire on live targets in the online multiplayer mode.
Overall, the campaign is short and uneventful, with plenty of repetitive moments and enough atrocious voice acting to make you almost glad that it's not particularly long. It's backed up by some decent multiplayer that comes in deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a capture the flag variant where players attempt to capture the ASE. While the control sort of got in my way here from time to time, there's really nothing else quite like it on the Wii. Heck, it even has support for the WiiSpeak peripheral, which hasn't seen any use since it was released alongside Animal Crossing: City Folk. Unfortunately, you'll have to exchange friend codes with other people who own a WiiSpeak if you actually want to use it, as it's disabled in games with random opponents. But if you've been following the way Nintendo rolls with its online feature set, that probably won't come as much of a surprise.
It has a generic look to it, but The Conduit doesn't look bad. The environments can get sort of large, and the areas are detailed well enough. You'll probably notice that those environments aren't destructible, and the enemy design is kind of lame. It also maintains a good, smooth frame rate throughout.
If you're just comparing it to other action games released on the Wii, The Conduit does some interesting things with its control and with its multiplayer modes. But other aspects, like the poor story, bland design, and awful voice acting, would be just as bad on any platform. It's that stuff that drags The Conduit down into an area where it's tough to recommend without providing a boatload of caveats.




Another terrible review by a Wii hater, this is the same guy who reviewed Zelda TP for Gamespot. Giant bomb is one the most firece Wii haters, and coupled with this atrocious person reviewing for them, they make up a terrible site. The review is contradicting every other reviewer so far save for Gamespot and Gamepro. They rated it the same as Target Terror, what a fucking joke.



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I love Wii Music.



Proud poster of the 10000th reply at the Official Smash Bros Update Thread.

tag - "I wouldn't trust gamespot, even if it was a live comparison."

Bets with Conegamer:

Pandora's Tower will have an opening week of less than 37k in Japan. (Won!)
Pandora's Tower will sell less than 100k lifetime in Japan.
Stakes: 1 week of avatar control for each one.

Fullfilled Prophecies

OMG this game is good! I love it! :) I played it and it took me 2 days to finish it and the single player mode isnt that bad like most people think, and the online is amazing. The graphics are great for a Wii title and I cant wait for a next game in the series.
but i hope in the next game they do more like outdoor stages like jungles and stuff like going to the alien base and crash in a forest it was good but their was too much in doors and underground base that all looked the same but still its a great game and I hope the sales for this game get alot, i predict that in the games life time it might sell over 5 million ? i think or is it a little bit to much. But yea I hate it when people think a game sucks just because number 1 it isnt made from nintendo or just beacuse its from the Wii, a game shouldn't be judged buy the console its on but on the game itself.



Wii Music is my life. I would take a bullet for Wii Music.



Proud poster of the 10000th reply at the Official Smash Bros Update Thread.

tag - "I wouldn't trust gamespot, even if it was a live comparison."

Bets with Conegamer:

Pandora's Tower will have an opening week of less than 37k in Japan. (Won!)
Pandora's Tower will sell less than 100k lifetime in Japan.
Stakes: 1 week of avatar control for each one.

Fullfilled Prophecies

It's his opinion, honestly I don't know why making a big fuzz about.



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When you hate something you cant give an objective view about it, that's perhaps the big fuzz about it, but maybe that's just me and any random guy could start reviewing games.



Proud poster of the 10000th reply at the Official Smash Bros Update Thread.

tag - "I wouldn't trust gamespot, even if it was a live comparison."

Bets with Conegamer:

Pandora's Tower will have an opening week of less than 37k in Japan. (Won!)
Pandora's Tower will sell less than 100k lifetime in Japan.
Stakes: 1 week of avatar control for each one.

Fullfilled Prophecies

You dont need an all seing eye to see the Wii hate and the trolls to follow in this thread.



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trestres said:
When you hate something you cant give an objective view about it, that's perhaps the big fuzz about it, but maybe that's just me and any random guy could start reviewing games.

The same could be said about someone who loves something as well.  I think the trick with making reviews meaningful is to only pay attention to reviews that are written by people with the same values as you, for example, if you don't care about graphics, then reading a review from someone who's a graphics whore won't be very relevant to you.



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Same score they gave Haze.

I was going to rent this game, but I'm not even sure it's worth the 2 bucks now.



While everyone is entitled to their opinion, one thing I keep reading about the Conduit is complaints about the story.

When was the last time a FPS game had a story to write home about?

Are not they (almost all) either -- win WWII or beat invading space aliens?

And aside from a few RPG classics, do we talk about the story of a game much long-term?

My point here is that this is a cheap way to take review points away from games you do not like. Seems to have done the trick here for the person who has notoriety only because his former site fired him after a controversy on a game company buying a good review (and he not going along with it) -- instead of firing him over inconsistent past reviews.

Mike from Morgantown
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