GamesRadar - Wii Reviews

Wacky Races: Crash & Dash (Review)

18/06/2008

Wacky Races would like to consider itself on a par with Micro Machines - in both, your input into the races is minimal. You can’t accelerate or brake, just simply waggle the Wii-mote to boost, and steer with the Nunchuk. Dick Dastardly occasionally steps in with simple minigame ‘booby traps’ for your racers to avoid, but they’re uninspired and disruptive to the flow of a race. Younger audiences might get a brief kick ...

Wall-E (Review)

2/07/2008

Damn you Wall-E, and damn whoever decided to come up with that way our trash-compacting, lonely-hearts-surfing robo-friend constantly repeats his own name in gurgling, quasi-’endearing’ fashion. It’s not cute, it’s not appealing, it’s... oh, the movie’s set to rake in $250 million? Ah. Shows how much we know. Still, at least the blatantly nicked premise shows promise. Take sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf and ...

Wario Land: The Shake Dimension (Review)

23/09/2008

Wario isn’t a complicated man, and making a decent Wario game isn’t really a complicated business. In fact, we’d boil it down to one very simple rule: capture his bulbous incompetence without succumbing to it. Give us clumsy, piggy-eyed foibles, but do it with class and intelligence. ...

Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (Review)

16/01/2007

The Wii is already bloated with party games, but there's a good chance the frenetic pace and schizophrenic style of WarioWare: Smooth Moves will topple them all. Using only the remote (called the Form Baton here), you'll engage in 200-plus ultra-fast minigames that range from clipping fingernails to balancing on a ball to whacking the thieving arm of a dodgy old man. Each lasts mere seconds, and then it's off to the next with barely any time to catch your breath. It's fast, it's fun and most ...

Water Warfare (Review)

17/09/2009

“Water Warfare is the first family-friendly first-person shooter for WiiWare!” proclaims the PR patter. We’d rather be spraying bullets made from alien acid blood into our opponents’ faces, but hey, let’s give H2O a chance. There’s an eight-player online mode and everything.

Chance given. This is trash. ...

We Cheer (Review)

15/04/2009

As you’d expect, We Cheer is totally wholesome and American – what else could a game about cheerleading be? It uses two remotes as virtual pompoms, which you whirl around according to the on-screen arrows. The actions seem authentically cheerleadery – lots of air-punching and arm-windmilling – and up to four people can play at once (presumably in a very large room) with one remote each. ...

We Love Golf! (Review)

15/07/2008

You know you’re in safe hands when you load up We Love Golf. It’s that Camelot logo – it instantly speaks of heritage and gravitas. It’s also the final nail in the coffin of the dream that someday the Wii might play home to a golf game that actually feels like real golf. After all, if they can’t do it, no one can. ...

We Rock: Drum King (Review)

27/04/2009

Human beings aren’t centipedes, and they don’t have quite the same control over each of their individual limbs. Not when it comes to co-ordinating each with another in different combinations over and over again, anyway. But that’s no excuse for the toughness of Drum King’s intermediate and hard difficulty levels. ...

We Ski (Review)

13/05/2008

The Adonis-like figures bestowed by Wii Fit go someway toward justifying that hefty balance board start-up cost. But, for our money, it’s the strength of supporting third party software that will truly justify the purchase. ‘Babes’ digging our mad balancing skillz will only get it a free pass for so long; a sorry looking pile of sneered at DK Bongos reminding what fate befalls a library-less peripheral. ...

Wii Chess (Review)

22/01/2008

Precious few details about Wii Chess were disclosed to the press prior to its release, but we could just imagine what those fun-wielding maniacs at Nintendo would come up with. The old playing pieces of yore abandoned in favour of Nintendo-themed chess sets, with cute little animations as a bishop-Link slices a Toad-pawn in half, for example. Even accounting for the fact that it comes from the more po-faced ‘Wii Something-Or-Other lineage, theres still scope for charm, with customisable ...

Wii Fit (Review)

29/04/2008

We’re sweating bullets - and we haven’t even stepped onto the board yet. Of all Nintendo’s wacky lifestyle experiments there are none that skirt as close to the game/non-game border as this. Nintendo’s previous jaunts into the realms of mental and ocular betterment have always had gamey connotations - we cannot, after all, pull homemade eye and arithmetic tests out of thin air. ...

Wii Fit Plus (Review)

21/10/2009

As another new year looms, we approach the time when Balance Boards will be dragged from under sofas and doomed resolutions will be made by fatties across the land. Is anyone going to lose that post-holiday belly by standing on a set of bluetooth-equipped scales and wobbling in front of a Wii? Maybe not, given how thoroughly dull and sterile Wii Fit can be. A few sessions later, the interest wanes. At least that’s our experience of it ...

Wii Music (Review)

30/10/2008

Publisher Nintendo’s own master creator Shigeru Miyamoto proudly declares that the company’s “play along with the band” offering Wii Music isn’t really a video game, so much as it is an interactive toy. He’s right, too. ...

Wii Play (Review)

12/02/2007

After spending no more than an hour with Nintendo's latest assortment of minigames, we'd unlocked everything there was to see. Considering the simplicity of all nine included games, it's plain to see that this is actually a $10 budget game bundled with a "free" Wii Remote, which runs about $40 anyway. But even if the value is suspect, there's still a decent amount of fun to have - just dont expect another multiplayer explosion like Wii ...

Wii Sports (Review)

21/11/2006

When you're introducing people to something radically different from what they're used to, it's a good idea to start off slow and simple. With that in mind, Wii Sports is the perfect pack-in for Nintendo's Wii console; not only are its simple minigames fun and ultra-accessible for casual gamers, but you couldn't ask for a better tutorial on using the motion-sensitive Wii remote. The title might sound intimidating or even boring to non-sports-fans, but Wii Sports tosses out stuff like stat ...

Wii Sports Resort (Review)

26/07/2009

For the first time in two and a half years Nintendo has a game that plays exactly like it does in the advert. Guy hiding behind the sofa during Resident Evil 4? Liar. Lady lunging across the living room in Wii Sports Tennis? Sick in the head. Wii Sports Resort, however, doesn’t lie. Nintendo could front the campaign with a chorus line of MPs and we’d still believe in its miracle powers.

The moment it clicked? ...

Wild West Guns - Wii Software (Review)

1/10/2008

Have you played Wii Play target shoot? Then you’ve played most of Wild West Guns. To Gameloft’s credit, they squeeze more fun out of similar lightgun challenges – combo chaining for massive scores is addictive stuff and interactive backgrounds allow for experimentation. The cowboy visuals are nicely handled, though how the same female hostage ends up in the middle of every bandit shootout is beyond us. ...

Wing Island (Review)

20/03/2007

Carrying out acts of daring missions through the bright sunny skies is an attractively heroic concept, played out to a glorious fanfare reminiscent of Studio Ghiblis superb flying pig movie Porco Rosso. Alas, in reality it has all the flying finesse of holding a plastic spoon full of baby food and faking plane noises to pilot it into a babys mouth. The Wii remote handles like a miniplane in your hand; you dip the it, the plane dips instantaneously; you twist it, the plane twists ...

Winter Sports 2: The Next Challenge (Review)

22/04/2009

Feeling nostalgic, we booted up Winter Sports 2, hoping for a quick hit of snow-filled sporting frolics. Our enthusiasm soon melted away like a snowball down our pants, however. Winter Sports is the sort of title that lives or dies by the quality of its events. ...

Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge (Review)

23/01/2008