Where's the quality assurance team when you need it?
(-) broken motion detection and broken collision detection; some of the fugliest visuals ever spotted on Wii; horrendous camera; appalling music and stupid sound effects; cheap and obnoxious platforming
Dropping the quality assurance that Nintendo once had has lead to some pretty disastrous consequences. It was a painful jump from a robust line up where you could traditionally find good games, to one where anything goes and developers can get away with the worst of crap when releasing a game to the Wii. These people think we're idiots, that we'll pick up about anything that has an amusing cover, and be able to put up with the torture of turning the system on and playing the game.
Data Design Interactive is like the cancer of the video game industry. Slowly eating into the once credible library of games with inferior shovel-wear products, preying on the unsuspecting souls who happen to pick the game up, oh I'm sorry, game(s). This evil company has pumped out more than 20 games, using the same unchanged engine, with practically intentional brokenness and lack of everything, and expects people to be attracted with a mere budget price tag.
Anubis II is perhaps the company's second most well know, by that I mean the one most people pan and cuss at, second to only the epic gem Ninjabread Man. This big heaping pile of crap is thought to have some sort of story, involving something like the evil spirit of Mumm'hotep and you, a Farrel dog or something like that, having to stop them, at least that's what the manual wants you to believe, but there's no explanation given in the game itself regarding this.
The levels are constructed like a treasure hunt, where you need to find eight uninspired pyramids hidden throughout the level to activate a portal to the next. To do this, you'll need to put up with an abuse of mind-numbing jumping puzzles and tons of ugly enemies to take down. What makes this so hard are the god-awful controls. Firstly, you need to jump by flicking the nun-chuck (or pressing Z which the stupid game won't clue you on that either). The responsiveness for the jump works, maybe a little too well, because you can barely tilt the nun-chuck accidentally and your wolf will jump. But good luck fighting with the demonic camera, which will often turn around continuously or get stuck beneath the ground, making it impossible for you to progress through the level.
But what would a plat-former be without a ton of enemies to answer to? Anubis will have to deal with the likes of a ton of unsightly and generic enemies, like walking pyramids, clouds of locusts, bugs, and more. These guys will often come in the swarms too. Your basic attack is swinging the sector by waggling the Wii remote, which is horribly unresponsive to say the very least. Typically, the ratio for performing a successful attack are 1/7. Anubis will either stand there like a moron, or twist his sector around playfully to try and activate a puzzle. And even if it does register, you'll never be too sure with the nightmarish collision detection, which that will crop your chances down yet another 1/5 fraction. In case you haven't figured out by now, and if you have basic reading ability then you should have, it's best to avoid combat all together.
It's like the entire game was designed specifically to infuriate players, because each of the coveted pyramids are placed in the most incoherent of spots, and you're required to track them all down to complete the level, so if you collect seven of them and miss one back behind, you'll be forced to backtrack your entire way to reach it. An arrow is supposed to guide you to your destination, but it often glitches out and points somewhere else entirely. And some more small but noticeable glitches lies in the health system. You can gather a heart to replenish one bit of health out of 10 possible slots, 5 being the starting amount. If you have the maximum amount of hearts, and you collect one, for some unbelievable reason, you'll be reset backward to 5. That speaks volumes about the effort put into this shameless rip off of a game, which it tries to mess with you in every chance it gets, and won't stop until it inflicts a splitting headache.
Between levels you have these ridiculous mini games where you're supposed to gather green scarabs while avoiding an angry pack of yellow bugs, but this is nearly impossible to do unless you're some sort of masochist who loves torturing himself by playing this game over and over again. But it's not like they're necessary, they're just for bonus points, but it's still annoying to be forced to do this tedious and frustrating task against your will.
Anubis II sets a bar for the ugliest of the ugliest on Wii, a console known for having games that already don't look good when being judged by today's standards. Most Wii games actually don't look that bad, but it's games like this that give the console a bad reputation. The Nintendo 64 for literally outdo this. The environments are dull and simple, all colored with some form of yellow or orange, the enemies are incredibly stupid looking creatures which often having bobbing heads, and for some uncompromisable reason, the frame rate is still bad enough to contribute to a migraine. Not helping matters is the audio, which works hand in hand with the truly archaic graphics to assault the senses. The music is repulsive and just plain annoying, especially for the tutorial level (which is used for all DDI's plat-formers at their tutorials), the sound effects are embarrassingly bad as well. Anubis will make this incredibly pathetic bark when he gathers all the pyramids, and the walking pyramids will make a sound similar to a fat kid having a quiet bowl movement but trying his best to hold it in. You'll hear these sounds on the regular basis, often over and over together in a cluttered mess. You don't even need a controller to fall victim to this game's awful spell. Simply watching it in motion is enough to cause discomfort.
The most depressing thing about Anubis II is even if the graphics were decent, music was better, controls actually worked, camera actually cooperated, and everything else was patched up and fixed, this would still be a very boring and generic platformer that wouldn't even be thought of when compared to Super Mario Galaxy, Sonic Colors, or (heaven forbid) Crash Mind Over Mutant. I could go on for another fortnight that we should all stay away from anything pumped from the rectum of Data Design Interactive, but any gamers with decent knowledge should already know by common sense. This company is doing nothing but trying to destroy the video game industry, by slapping out ten or twenty half-finished "games" in stores practically days apart from each other, all with identical menus, interfaces, and horrendous controls. Actively ignoring any game with the birth defect that is the big DDI logo is the only way we can work together and pull the plug on the truly horrible company. Unless you want to tie someone you hate up and force him to play through all six levels as a torture device, that would actually work better than yanking toe-nails.