Eledees in one fell swoop, showcases an impressive game design married to impressive technology. This is a minor gem.
At first I thought the game had excellent mechanics, but was a little shallow. My opinion changed over time. The best way to think about Elebits is as an arcade game. It really feels like you've fed a few coins into a machine, the time limits kicks in and you're using this amazing peripheral in your hand to get the most out of your money before the timer runs out. It's been an exciting time to play a game like this that actually uses the controller as much as something like Wii Sports does. It really has a very rewarding, eye opening revolutionary control mechanic. It feels like direct interaction with the gameworld. Previously looking at footage I thought it could be approximated on PC, but after playing it, no. This could not be done on PC. It really uses the Wii controller as a 3-D mouse to give you really fine control over your enviroment and is completely beyond a dual stick controller. Once you've plucked through a couple of missions you find yourself doing really crazy things, zipping through levels, using complex interactions within the game world. It actually uses the wii controller to sense depth so you will find yourself pulling and pushing items in and out of the screen, rotating objects and this isn't some random gesture control, it's fine tuned and accurate and very satisfying. You can actually fling items into the air and then catch them mid air in a delicious juggling act. I found myself lifting up a microwave, stacking it on boxes, flipping open the door, grabbing a pizza, feeding it into the box then turning it on, all the while zapping elebits at the same time. To put its control in some perspective, you can actually feed a CD into the slot of a disc shredder, in a 3-D space with no camera assistance, plane switching or automatic button pressing. Once you get further into the game it becomes a lot more complex, items have to be used in order or activated through different ways like a puzzle, elebits become harder to find, your gun has to be powered up to lift heavier objects, you wrap your head around the power-ups which are really neat, either luring, shocking or deafening the little beasts, you have limitations like not causing noise (careful with those pot lids) and not breaking things (watch out for the vases) And of course rooting through the environment causing chaos never gets tired.
Almost everything in the environment can be manipulated with a fine degree of control, talk about design depth. The only problem is that it uses the pointer, which means that you can't physically turn your wrist with the full range of desired motion, as the pointer must remain trained at the screen. It's a minor annoyance and probably wont bother you more than a couple of times. There is a level editor mode where you can act like a 3-D game designer with the wii remote and it really gives you time to manipulate the objects in a 3-D space which is just trippy with the controller. You can place objects in mid-air in suspended animation and then build things, like spell out your name in blocks. And there is this visible line that goes from the end of your controller to the point in the TV which shows how the game is translating your every little movement into action. These levels you create can be sent to friends to mess about with. It adds longevity to the title. What's startling about Elebits is how it's game design in one fell swoop shows what a controller can offer to gameplay as opposed to the traditional view of what other hardware related performance upgrades can offer. Both approaches have benefits the other doesn't IMO. The makers of Psi-ops playing this game would have a field day with the mechanics, it makes the gravity gun in Half Life 2 look like a blunt instrument. But I would have really liked the game tooled around a first person detective game or a crime scene investigator game. Some reviews took issue with the cutscenes, which are not FMV or real time but largely 2-D artwork, slightly animated to give them life. Apart from the subtitles and slightly hokey voice acting, I find the presentation and illustrations bewilderingly beautiful. The st-yle reminds me very much of Odins Sphere. Take a look at an example here
A lot of hooplah has been made about the graphics, but whilst simple they are also very stylistic and aestetically beautiful, with some really nice, soft lighting and bright colours. Unfortunately the outdoor areas look nowhere near as nice and suffer from frequent slowdown, not even because of the complex physics going on. Even when everything is stationary, in some outdoor sections slowdown is apparent. The physics of larger objects isn't as satisfying as the smaller ones either, being a little floaty. Otherwise, those who believe that the Wii can't do physics would do well to play this game. Because of the control method you can constantly shift the environment, watching the constant recalculation of cause and effect on the fly, with a huge number of objects of different mass and weight all affecting one another. Some of the later levels really mix things up, gravity has gone haywire and you'll find yourself gazing about like you were on a spaceship, watching objects float by, listening to the trippy, hip and really-catchy chill out tunes the game pumps out. Elebits has been like a breath of fresh air to me, a giant injection of pizazz. It's astonishingly new and I continually marvel at the mechanics. The mechanics could and should be applied to a different genre of game for my tastes, with a dark storyline and a more laid back investigation/puzzle feel. And the time limits and basic "get elebits" objective do limit the game. But my, the potential is certainly there for the future.