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by Adam Rosenberg
I don’t know what was more surreal about a demo I did last week of High Voltage Software’s “The Conduit”: being given gameplay pointers by actor Mark Sheppard (known most recently for his work on “Dollhouse” and “Battlestar Galactica”) or the novelty of actually playing a top-tier Wii-exclusive first-person shooter. You see, “The Conduit” isn’t just the closest anyone has come to delivering a solid FPS experience on Nintendo’s Wii. It simply is one.
At least, that’s the impression I walked away with after spending slightly more than an hour playing through the game from its start. Following a brief, “Metroid”-style intro in which you learn to play the game with the help of some of its most powerful tools, a flashback kicks in and you’re back to being a regular old human being with a regular old pea-shooter of a handgun. Of course, this human being is Secret Service agent Michael First (voiced by Sheppard) and he’s about to go on a little bit of an adventure.
As this was my first demo of “The Conduit,” I focused most of my attention on the controls and how adaptable they are to player tastes. At base, the gameplay is FPS-standard: you move from room to room and take out enemies. There’s an All-Seeing Eye device (ASE) which, once found, can be used to find hidden messages, door switches and enemies. This is just a minor twist on familiar gameplay however; in “The Conduit,” the wheel remains the wheel.
Impressively, “The Conduit” does manage to reinvent by offering players an unprecedented level of control over how the game plays and looks. In addition to five difficult settings and adjustable pointer sensitivity, the size of the Wii remote’s dead zone can be set along individual X and Y axes. This changes how far off from the center of the screen the crosshairs can go before your character’s head starts to move. The entire HUD can also be rearranged from the Options menu by clicking and dragging the different readout boxes (i.e. health, ammo, mission objectives, ASE status, etc.) around the screen.
The visuals also push the boundaries of what we’ve come to accept as normal for a Wii game. “The Conduit” won’t stand toe-to-toe with “Call of Duty 4” of course, but there’s a lot to like about what High Voltage has accomplished here. The Wii proves to be perfectly capable of handling the game’s extensive use of reflective surfaces, depth of field, water effects and other visual tricks that are typically associated with more powerful hardware.
The only complaint I really walked away from the demo with is that the checkpoint saves feel as though they’re spaced a bit too far apart. Of course, it should be noted that I elected to play on the game’s “Elevated” difficulty setting, one higher than the default “Guarded.” The higher difficulty didn’t result in more effective enemy tactics, though it did make the opposition noticeably more aggressive, not to mention more effective with their weapons. At the default difficulty, the distance between checkpoints probably feels just right.
That pretty much sums up my first hands-on attempt with “The Conduit.” Publisher Sega is looking to June 23 as the release date, so the wait won’t be much longer. In addition to the single player campaign’s nine missions, the game will also feature a full-blown multiplayer component. I didn’t get to try it, though you can expect to see 10+ modes, a full range of weapons and Wii Speak compatibility for up to 12 players.
The insanely adaptable controls may blaze trails for future FPS titles, but “The Conduit” is worth attending to simply because there is no other game quite like it on Nintendo’s console. There are some that come close, but High Voltage’s presentation felt instantly familiar and comfortable to this hard-bitten shooter fan. “The Conduit” may not be a game-changer in the traditional sense, but it complements the few, highly effective tricks up its sleeve by filling a long-ignored niche in the Wii catalog.
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