It's doubtful anyone was begging for a video game of building blocks, but those few out there will be disappointed.
(-)..... but absolutely no fun after that / motion controls are awkward and pretty unresponsive / some blocks can be pulled out easily while others get completely stuck / level themes like cannons and dinosaurs are tacked on and make the game even more annoying / worthless mini games
It's easy to just look at the cover art of Atomic Planet's latest puzzle game and wonder what they were thinking. Jenga is one of those little known classic puzzle games where you build a stack of blocks, and take them out one at a time in turn based multiplayer games to try and make the stack higher and higher, and the game's all over when the tower comes crashing down. But Heaven knows it can be irritating building the tower back up again. Apparently somebody thought that was a good enough excuse to bring Jenga to your Nintendo Wii in a full budget priced release, with Jenga World Tour. It seems like a decent fit for Nintendo's motion control powered system, but you have to wonder why they bothered. Even if done correctly a game like Jenga World Tour would still have no business being on a video game console, but then you have to comprehend that it's got serious control issues, stupid level themes, and a ton of other annoyances, and you don't even have a taste of how awful this putrid game really is.
The feature list is threadbare, but you'd expect it to be. The main meat of the game is the World Tour mode, where you go off into different locations and even time periods, to beat contestants at a Jenga match. You'll see different level themes which have a slight change in rules for the game, and some generic Wii specific mini games between some matches that you'll forget about immediately. You may also choose to play a quick match with up to four friends, but if you're alone or if they don't want to be your friend anymore for subjecting them to a game like this, three computer controlled opponents, in what seems like a game of endurance. And if you're really bored, you can go to the arcade mode and play a match of Jenga by yourself as different rules are thrown at you at random.
Jenga starts out as an amusing distraction and a nice novelty. You might even say it's one of the better shovel-wear alternatives on Nintendo's system. It's absurd, but charmingly so, being able to choose from some goofy characters like a slot machine dressed in cowboy attire, a creepy onion thing that's bound to give you nightmares as you sleep the next day, and a flirtatious Hawaiian girl with what appears to have a cleft. The game also offers numerous ways to dress up the blocks, like with ice, fire, and other things, and it can be mildly amusing seeing fire blocks in the deepest pit of the ocean.
It might take you a few hours of play before everything sinks in and you finally realize just how broken everything is. Even know you would think the controls would work, after all if any system could do it it would have to be the Wii, they're actually very clunky, imprecise, painful, and annoying. You press A on a block in the stack, then you hold onto the B button to pull. After you've got that over with, you put it at the top of the stack. All this sounds simple in theory, but the game's depth perception is pretty messed up, so it's very easy to over or under shoot your placements, and it takes a lot of needless stretching to get the block remotely where you wanted it to go.
The only other things you really need to know is how to place tacks on the other blocks above and below your target, probably because the developers knew before hand that the Wii's motion functionality just isn't precise enough to resemble a game like Jenga which is dependent on careful touch and movement of blocks. The game uses a color coded system to tell you which are the best blocks to move. Some of them have a green lining when you select them, which is meant to indicate that they'll slide out with relative ease. While others are red, which shouldn't be tampered with. All of these things seem like a nice gesture, but even these simple principals fail to come together very well. Some blocks will slip on through as if they've been lubricated, others will have you juggling the remote with disgust and eventually pull something because they seemed to be jammed in there like a solid brick.
Even the game's artificial "intelligence" seems just as broken as everything else. In the world tour mode, you'll face off against two different types of players. First of all, there's the smart AI which'll react within seconds while you struggled for ten minutes or longer to get a single block out, and make you feel like a complete moron. These guys seem to always know which is the best block to take out, and beating them involves a whole lot of blind trial and error which is bound to get the best of you before too long. Then there's the stupid AI, which is easily exploited. I've encountered times when there was one block from the side at a new row, and placed a block not in the middle nor at the side, and watched as the computer's brain sprung a leak and they tried to move the block in with all their might for ten minutes and longer. There were even other times when the block randomly crashed down for no reason! When moments like you messing the tower up just before their turn comes up, and watching their head fry as they try to find somewhere to place the block qualifies as the game highest point, then there's little reason to have faith in Jenga: World Tour.
As if the game wasn't irritating enough as it is, the level themes do their part in making the game as unbearable as possible. The better of them are just merely pointless, like the fire blocks which can only be held for about ten seconds then must be dropped, but you could just seize your grasp if you're already trying to get them out, so it stays out of the way most of the time. There are also some vines in the jungle areas which'll render certain blocks unusable for one turn, and aliens which'll disintegrate a single block if you don't already swat the spaceship with your remote. World Tour is at its worst in the jungle and medieval levels, which feel like they're designed to piss you off. At the jungle, there's a Pterosaur which'll fly from nowhere and take your block every now and then and render your turn worthless, and a f%#king dinosaur which'll stomp around and cause the tower to crash down when there's nothing you could have done about it. If that's somehow not enough to make you dismiss this game forever, then it's likely that the medieval level will do the trick. There's cannons hitting around from all directions which bombard the tower and eventually cause it to come crashing down, and even worse all this motion goes beyond the limits of the game's engine, which otherwise the graphics aren't too bad, but with all the slowdown going on it makes the game even more irritating than it already was.
With all these random events occurring all the time, it quickly dawns on you that there's very little point in playing Jenga. You'll finish the World Tour mode within less than two hours, then never think about it again. Achieving victory in the game requires very little skill beyond moderate mastery of the controls, because you'll just be waiting round by round for random circumstances to cripple the tower at your opponent's turn, and even in that case you won't really feel that accomplished because the whole thing was only luck. Jenga World Tour starts out as a game that hits that certain sweet spot of being so bad it's good, but once that mild amusement runs down you're left with a lifeless game that can't even get the basics right. All the additions feel un-necessary and annoying, the controls rotten, the AI worthless, and no worthwhile extra features to speak of. Jenga World Tour is exactly the kind of game that gives the Wii a bad name, and some developers really need to realize that just because Nintendo's quality control seems forgiving doesn't mean people can get away with releasing crap like this.