Wii Reviews

Anno (Dawn of Discovery) on Wii is exactly how you’d imagine it to be and – more importantly – exactly how you want it to be. Its concept might be fairly dry but the game itself has been ‘Wii-fied’ to make it as accessible as a strategy game could hope to be.

Buildings and other structures can be plonked down in an almost comically easy fashion while road building is a snap.

Paint is reborn. Paint is now fun. It’s all thanks to de Blob, who’s basically a fat sponge. Fun-haters called the INKT Corporation have sucked all life from the world, presumably because they think it makes them big in front of the girls or something.

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...

In our opinion the most annoying, least fun to fight enemies in any game cheap enough to have them are the pint-size scurrying creatures that run along the ground below your gunsights and leap up at your face. Rubbish, aren’t they? Actually, maybe it’s a tie between those and the little flying enemies that are incredibly hard to target and do a disproportionate amount of damage. Take your pick.

There’s no two ways about it: Wii usually gets the shaft when it comes to top shelf third party support. What system generally has the weakest version of a multiplatform title? Wii. What system gets a weird spin-off like Soulcalibur Legends, Castlevania Judgment or Dragon Quest Swords instead of a genuine sequel? That’d be Wii as well.

Wii owners: your system has not yet devolved into a platform only for the casual, the family-friendly, and the undiscerning eye. Deadly Creatures proves that Wii-exclusive titles can still be brutal, imaginative, and way more than mindless waggle. We have crawled amongst the exoskeletal warzones underneath human feet, and it was good.

What proud son doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps? We can think of a few ol’ blocks you don’t want to be a chip off - Saddam Hussein, Noel Edmonds, the Grim Reaper. Alas, then, for poor Death Jr., son of the soul collector. And alas for Root of Evil, a port of a PSP title, it’s a massive chip off the old block - with blocky being the key word. Where in the developers’ handbook does it state

Deca Sports (Sports Island in the UK) has simple and genteel controls that mean you won’t be destroying any hardware - or indeed your wrists - and it’s a far less hectic proposition all round; ice skating, curling and badminton are hardly in the same adrenaline-pumping class as pole vaulting, hurdling and hammer-throwing.