Nintendo Land Review

Moving on to attractions that support multiple players, The Legend of Zelda Battle Quest lets you and up to three friends venture into Nintendo Land's charming fabric-and-buttons imitation of Hyrule. If you wield the tablet, your weapon is a bow. As you move the tablet around, the screen acts like a window into the gameworld, letting you look in any direction. Pulling back on the right stick draws your bow, and releasing it lets your arrow fly. If you're playing with a Wii Remote, you take the role of a swordsman. Swordplay is similar to that in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Enemies are often shielded from vertical strikes but vulnerable to horizontal swings (or vice versa), and you've got to change up your attacks accordingly. Both swordplay and archery feel great, and the freedom to look in all directions via the tablet is a particularly nifty use of the Wii U's capabilities. Unfortunately, though this attraction can be played by one player, the difficulty doesn't scale well; unless you approach it with a good number of friends, the challenge becomes overwhelming after the first few stages.

Most of Nintendo Land's attractions are pleasantly simple and straightforward, but Pikmin Adventure strays into shallowness. Your role again varies depending on whether you're playing with the tablet or with a remote. With the tablet, your Mii dons Captain Olimar's spacesuit and attacks enemies and environmental objects by throwing pikmin at them; you simply tap something on the touch screen to hurl pikmin at it. If you're playing with a remote, you dress up as a pikmin and attack things directly. There's a solo or cooperative Challenge mode in which you try to progress through 16 stages, and a competitive Versus mode in which players battle it out to see who can claim the most candy. It's diverting for a little while, and the Pikmin-esque trappings are cute, but the button-mashing (or, if you're playing with the tablet, whatever you call the touch screen equivalent of button-mashing) gameplay is too basic to make this attraction more than a brief diversion.

Significantly better than Pikmin Adventure is Metroid Blast. With the tablet, you take control of a cartoonishly small version of Samus Aran's gunship. The piloting controls are intuitive, and because the vulnerable spots on enemies are often quite small, you'll want to take advantage of the ship's zoom function and engage in some satisfying sharpshooting as you soar around. With a remote and nunchuk, you fight on foot in the Mii equivalent of Samus' distinctive suit. The competitive option in Metroid Blast pits the gunship pilot against the other players. The pilot has the advantage of aerial maneuverability, but the other players are smaller, more elusive targets, capable of curling up into a ball and of zipping up to grapple points scattered around the arena. (You can also eschew the tablet and just battle on the ground.)

Competitive Metroid Blast is an enjoyable sci-fi shootout, especially if you and your friends take turns piloting the gunship. And the solo or cooperative Assault Mission mode is a great offering that takes you through a variety of Metroid-inspired environments and pits you against an assortment of Metroid-inspired enemies, including a towering version of the monster Kraid.

Pixel-style murals in attraction entrance hallways are a nice decorative touch.

Finally, there are those attractions that are strictly multiplayer and competitive. Each of these features asymmetrical multiplayer in which the player with the tablet plays a very different role from those wielding remotes. In Animal Crossing: Sweet Day, players with remotes run around an environment collecting candy. The player with the tablet controls two gatekeepers, one with each thumbstick, and tries to catch the other players, who move more slowly as they pick up more candy. Controlling the two gatekeepers puts you in a position where a number of things might be competing for your attention and you have to make quick decisions about how best to corner and capture the other players. As a fruit collector, you have your own decisions to make when the gatekeepers are near. Do you jettison some fruit to gain speed, or do you hang on to the fruit you've collected and risk getting caught in pursuit of the glory of victory?

Luigi's Ghost Mansion casts the player with the tablet as a ghost who must sneak up on the other players, causing them to faint. The other players are ghost hunters equipped with flashlights; if they catch the ghost in the beam of their light, the ghost flees and loses some health. The ghost is invisible on the television screen, though it may become briefly visible in a flash of lightning. Ghost hunters must use their flashlights sparingly--batteries drain quickly--but remotes start to vibrate when the ghost is near, encouraging ghost hunters to call out to each other and work together to defeat the ghost. It's suspenseful to feel the ghost near you and frantically try to find it with your flashlight, and playing as the ghost, successfully sneaking up to spook a ghost hunter is satisfying.

The best of the competitive bunch, though, is also the most traditional. Mario Chase is just a big game of hide-and-seek with a nifty technological twist. The player with the tablet is Mario; everyone else is a Toad whose job is to pursue Mario. In the Mario role, the tablet's screen shows you a map of the entire arena, and you can see your pursuers' positions at all times. This certainly gives you an edge, but you're outnumbered, and though the Toads don't know where you are, they can always see how far away from you they are, and whether they're getting closer to you or further away. Arenas are divided into four colored zones, making it easy for pursuers to call out to each other when they spot Mario and rally everyone to that area. It's a game full of thrilling captures and narrow escapes of the sort that elicit squeals of delight from victors and cries of anguish from losers. All in all, it's simply a great time.

The arenas for Mario Chase are the ideal size for exciting rounds of hide-and-seek.

There's one last thing to do in Nintendo Land. In each attraction, you earn coins, and you can spend these coins to play a simple game reminiscent of Peggle. Clearing stages here earns you prizes that reside in the park plaza. The pixelated coin drop game is oddly compelling, and it's rewarding to see your plaza go from an empty space to one filled with neat Nintendo-y things.

But like Nintendo Land's use of familiar properties, this bevy of prizes to collect wouldn't be worth much if it wasn't supported by good gameplay. Thankfully, it is. Nintendo Land isn't just a fine showcase of the Wii U's capabilities, though it certainly is that. It's also a great game in its own right, and particularly if you have friends or family members with whom you can play all of the multiplayer attractions, it's a great way to start getting a lot of enjoyment out of the new console immediately.