GamesRadar - Wii Reviews

F1 2009 (Review)

20/11/2009

Being mean to F1 2009 is a bit like chastising the puppy from the litter with the crossed eyes and gammy leg. It means well and it will still hump your leg with all the enthusiasm of its siblings, but you can’t help wishing you’d bought a pedigree. But you can’t blame Codemasters getting its foot in the door. As we write, Jenson Button has just taken the 2009 championship and F1 fever is riding high. ...

FaceBreaker (Review)

11/12/2008

Wii Sports Boxing let you punch your dad in the face. And get away with it. It was little more than a minigame, and a pretty imprecise one at that, but the inspired controls and glorious dad-punching made for a perfect family moment. FaceBreaker KO Party, despite offering a more substantial, solid experience than Wii Sports Boxing, hasn’t quite captured its style. ...

Family Glide Hockey (Review)

14/04/2009

Games aren’t about bringing families together; they’re about blowing them apart. Daddy, Mommy, Billy and Sarah, the eerily perfect nuclear family at the heart of Family Table Tennis, and now Family Glide Hockey, understand this only too well. Ever since they discovered the joy of humiliating each other through competitive sport, they’ve been determined to strain their familial bonds via ruthless, cold-blooded competition. ...

Family Ski & Snowboard (Review)

20/02/2009

If, like some of us, you think that going on skiing trips is about as far removed from the idea of a holiday as a spell behind bars, Family Ski & Snowboard could be a comfortable middle ground. You can dress your avatar or Mii in a wealth of hats, gloves, ski suits and outfits without actually having to spend half an hour struggling into a fluorescent ski suit. ...

Family Trainer: Extreme Challenge (Review)

2/09/2009

Perhaps hoping to capitalise on shops selling out of Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit, Active Life: Extreme Challenge (Family Trainer: Extreme Challenge in the UK) is a collection of ‘radical’ activities (kite surfing, skateboarding and so on) controlled by a dance mat thingy. ...

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Review)

2/07/2007

If you were expecting to just get a bland reproduction of the new Fantastic Four movie repackaged into a quick game port, you were wrong. The game takes plot elements from the movie, but also a heavy helping from the comic series, to weave a story chucked full of Fantastic Four nemeses. Everyone from the Skrull to Terrax to, dum, dum, dummmm: the Silver Surfer makes an appearance. But instead of feeling like a star-packed, universe encompassing rumble, it just feels like more stuff for The ...

Far Cry Vengeance (Review)

26/01/2007

If the first words you blurt out upon starting Far Cry Vengeance's main story aren't "Sweet Miyamoto, my eyes! I'm blind!" you're playing a different game than the rest of us. Muddy, low-resolution textures and grass draw in mere yards away as you move, the screen tears any time you move too quickly thanks in part to the limping, stuttering speed at which everything is drawn, and no quantity of cosmetic products could make any of the angular enemies palatable. It seems like even the developers ...

FIFA 08 (Review)

17/10/2007

Oct 17, 2007 Well, we must have misinterpreted the early signs for this one, because despite being promoted by a Mii-style Ronaldinho and featuring cartoony backgrounds and crazy new controls, its actually very much a traditional FIFA game. Quite a dated one, at that. If you stay away from the brightly coloured Party menu option then this is essentially a PS2-era soccer game, with the default camera angle changed to a vertically scrolling view to accommodate some counter-intuitive motion ...

FIFA 09 (Review)

28/10/2008

After a slightly disappointing effort at reinventing FIFA on Wii last year, EA have gone back to the tactics board and devised a brand new formation. ...

FIFA 10 (Review)

14/10/2009

EA have tossed realism out of the window for this year’s FIFA. And why not? Football’s started to get on our nerves lately, so it’s great to see all semblance of ‘accurate simulation’ given the boot in favour of a lightning-paced, thrill-a-second arcade goal-fest. ...

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time (Review)

1/04/2009

Call us musty old role-playing traditionalists, but the first thing we generally do after a monster drops an item is cram it in our over-stuffed invisible backpacks. We don’t, for instance, wear it on our heads, like Echoes of Time’s helpful AI companions choose to. It’s a bold fashion statement, no doubt about that, but we think we prefer the other way. ...

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King - Wii Software (Review)

15/05/2008

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is about building a city (around the prerequisite FF crystal). When you start playing all four walls of the city are in place, which is all the play area you're ever going to need. After all, it's the job of the king to stay home and build his kingdom - not go out and adventure. But to acquire the resources to fuel your building, you'll need to send your teenage adventurers out to fight in ...

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Review)

15/07/2008

We wouldn't blame you for writing off Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon at a glance - previous Chocobo games have suffered from overly-simplistic kid-friendly gameplay, which sounds like a recipe for disaster when mixed with the dungeon crawler genre. But with its variety of dungeon types and robust job system, Chocobo's Dungeon kept our interest for far longer than we expected. And with famed composer Nobuo Uematsu supervising the ...

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (Review)

6/07/2009

Bah +10! A pox upon Square Enix and their unquenchable thirst for WiiWare micro-transactions, because they’ve gone and hobbled something that could’ve been quite special here. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is fan service with a smile; less a true sequel to FFIV and more a ‘where are they now?’ update set 17 years after the original. Needless to say, those who enjoyed FFIV will be in their element here. ...

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Review)

13/11/2007

Nov 13, 2007 Okay folks, time to wipe those silly smirks off your faces; this isn't some mindless minigame compilation or Wii-mote-waggling shooter. This is Fire Emblem, a super-serious, cerebrally-challenging strategy RPG series that's more than earned its place in the spotlight alongside Mario and Link. Those of you with Wii Remotes in hand, waiting to train a puppy or cook with Mama, might be scratching your heads in bewilderment, but true Nintendophiles know exactly what we're talking ...

Fish'em All! (Review)

9/07/2009

Time constraints meant that it was a toss-up between reviewing either this or Cocoto Platform Jumper, and it’s a damning indictment on Cocoto that Fish ’Em All! won out. Whereas Icarian (NyxQuest) and Let’s Catch are shining examples of what we love about WiiWare, this insipid, joyless, pointless nonsense makes us want to weep. ...

Fishing Master (Review)

4/12/2007

Dec 4, 2007 Much like real-world fishing, Fishing Master for the Wii requires some time and plenty of patience before it pays off. In the beginning it is an over simplified, cartoony excuse to fling your WiiMote in the air and perform silly wrist actions with the Nunchuck. During that first hour you can pretty much figure out exactly how to bring in every catch and recognize when the fish will definitely get ...

Fun! Fun! Minigolf (Review)

15/04/2009

Don’t let those rampant exclamation marks fool you – this minigolf game isn’t that exciting. Maybe one mark, at a push, but two? That’s! Insane! This is golf of the uncraziest variety. Its three vanilla courses look pretty enough, but there are no clever Mouse Trap-style contraptions, no wacky pirate ships or fire-breathing golf dragons hidden in any of them. ...

Furu Furu Park (Review)

25/01/2008

We've lived with the Wii for more than a year now, so there's really no reason to belabor this opening point: Yes, the Wii plays host to an inordinate amount of minigame collections. Furthermore, most of them are insipid, although some few are actually worth your time, whether you're flying solo or waggling with companions. Furu Furu Park unfortunately does not fall into that worthwhile category, but it's hard to tell if it just misses the mark or if it truly falls into the category of soulless ...