Archive for the “Wii Reviews” Category

Skylands is
in danger! An unnamed Darkness looms over the horizon, the Skylanders have been
shrunk down and whisked away to earth and it is up to the new portal master to
rescue them from retailers everywhere (for a mere eight bucks a pop) so they
can save the day. Spyro the Dragon returns with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
in a way he hasn’t been seen before – in a three inch action figure…

Skylands is
in danger! An unnamed Darkness looms over the horizon, the Skylanders have been
shrunk down and whisked away to earth and it is up to the new portal master to
rescue them from retailers everywhere (for a mere eight bucks a pop) so they
can save the day. Spyro the Dragon returns with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
in a way he hasn’t been seen before – in a three inch action figure…

With brilliantly
imaginative games like Canvas Curse, Epic Yarn and Mass Attack, the Kirby
series has proven that it can re-invent itself and pull it off successfully
every time. But what about classic Kirby? Aside from Squeak Squad on DS, there
hasn’t been a traditional Kirby on consoles for more than a decade. Kirby’s
Return to Dream Land was worth the wait though – it’s a perfect example of how
to update a classic series and do everything right…

Have you had
hobo stew before? We knew a hobo once who could make a real mean stew. There’s
no science to the recipe. You just take whatever you can scrounge up and throw
it all into a boiling pot. Some of those ingredients may be better by
themselves or if prepared differently, but when you’re a hobo you take what you
can get. Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny is a stew with plenty of fixings in the
pot, but it’s a bit overcooked…

Above: 360/PS3 screenshot

What’s the coolest thing about playing as the Transformers? If you said “driving around as a car and never ever being a robot” then you probably work for Activision. That’s right folks: in Dark of the Moon - Stealth Force Edition for the Wii you never play as Transformers in robot form. So what do you do? Well you kinda just drive around shooting stuff and try really, really hard not to die…

The developers of Lost in Shadow try to squeeze every drop they can from the game’s core mechanic, and they do an admirable job of it. The story follows an unnamed boy who has his shadow separated from his body, and his now-sentient shadow takes a long fall from the top of a tower that looks suspiciously like it came out of the world of ICO or Shadow of the Colossus. The shadow’s quest is to climb the tower and regain his body. This leads to a whole lot of classic 2D platforming, but requires 3D thinking due to the nature of shadows…

Fluidity is a funny little puzzle game that sports a puddle of water as its main protagonist; however, you don’t get to control the water by any conventional means. Instead, the game sports a movement mechanic very similar to those ball-in-a-maze puzzles you used to play with as a kid. In order to move the water from one point to another, you must tilt the entire level. This simple design feature makes for a puzzle game that is incredibly fresh and genuinely satisfying to play…

Nintendo has proven time and time again that it can slap Mario and the gang on the cover of pretty much any kind of game, punt it out the door, and it’ll sell. The franchise has been largely synonymous with quality, though a few duds have snuck into the line-up. Past attempts to pair the heroic plumber with popular sporting pastimes haven’t always yielded the best results, but Mario Sports Mix strikes the right balance between solid sporting action and Mushroom Kingdom-themed wackiness…

The original de Blob was enough of a hit on the Wii that it has now officially jumped to Xbox 360, PS3, and DS (although that will be a different review). So now we have that weird scenario where players new to a game’s world must be able to grasp what’s going on, while at the same time those who played the first game need enough new toys to not feel like they’re playing the same game all over again. It seems clear that de Blob 2, afraid of scaring off the new players, hasn’t gone far enough to evolve its formula…