An ultra-cheap ball/maze tilting game for the credit crunch generation! Let’s roll with it! We mean, how bad can it be, right? Well, funny you should ask, because as it turns out the answer is ‘somewhere between Hitler and the Ebola virus’.

It’s sobering to see how badly such a simple, unfussy premise can be coded. Most tellingly, the tilting calibration (or lack thereof) is all over the shop – really jittery and unpredictable. It’s like you’ve got the maze in your hands but you’re in the body of a lobster. Still, try not to let your lack of accuracy get you down, lobsterboy, because for whatever reason, failure is an alien concept in The Incredible Maze. Not only does it automatically respawn you directly next to your falling point each time you drop off, but it throws infinite attempts into the bargain. There isn’t even a time tracker. What’s the point of it all?

If you shake your remote violently there’s an off-chance that the ball will ‘leap’ over an adjacent wall. Sometimes it won’t, but hey, while we’re rolling mazes and balls, we might as well be rolling some dice too, eh? It’s a conceptually flawed addition, anyway. Sometimes you can bypass entire levels with a single flick. It’s so exploitable that at times we wondered if it was even a deliberate inclusion. What else have we scrawled down on our notepad o’ flaws? Something about “erratic difficulty curves”, “terminally dull graphics” and “upsetting music”. Mercifully, our sad, sad tears have rendered the rest of our complaints illegible.

Early offerings such as Kororinpa and the unfairly-maligned Banana Blitz were criticized for a perceived lack of value for money, but The Useless Maze is proof that if you buy cheap, you buy twice. Actually, that’s lies; if you blow 500 points on this howler, you’ll likely border up your Wii Shop permanently.

Dec 18, 2008