On any other console it would have been panned as a disaster, but on the Wii The Conduit is a fun little shooter
Sharp, fully customizable aiming controls – varied arsenal of weapons – mostly entertaining action – lots of extras and fun cheats to unlock – one of the few shooters on the Wii
THE BAD:
Ugly, ugly visuals – weak sound effects – looping, repetitive music – lazy voice acting – you can't look up or down – dumb AI – constantly respawning aliens are a drag – invisible mines and exploding enemies are annoying – pixel-hunt puzzles break the pace – timed sections are never fun – cliché plot only starts making sense at the very end
Back in 2008 the only first-person shooters available on the Wii were the excellent Metroid Prime 3, the good Medal of Honor Heroes, the barely passable Red Steel and the shameful FarCry Vengeance. As you can imagine, the announcement of The Conduit was met with huge enthusiasm by the many Wii owners starved for good shooters using the system's innovative controls. Even if the first screenshots revealed a fairly ugly game, the promise of a hardcore sci-fi shooter along the line of Halo, with a fully featured multiplayer mode was enough to keep people hyped up. The game ended up racking low to average scores and most gamers were disappointed by a shooter with decent mechanics, but a design and production values reminescent of an early 2000s game.
The Conduit tells the story of agent Ford, a... mr. someone ordered around by a man called Adams talking to him over the radio. Adams belongs to some secret organization called The Trust and tells our hero a terrorist called Prometeus has brought in aliens trough portals called 'conduits' to invade Washington DC and agent Ford is the only one who can stop them, quite literally: you won't encounter a single friendly character in the whole game. To help him in his endeavour, Ford is given the game's plot device, a floating orb known as 'all seeing eye', or ASE, whose beam of light reveals invisible objects. The plot is taken straight from the book of FPS clichés, complete with obvious plot twist near the middle of the game and cliffhanger ending. Not much time has been spent coming up with something original or developing a personality for the cast of characters, the result being no one will care about what's going on. The only interesting thing happens right before the end, when it's just too little, and too late. It doesn't help that instead of cutscenes exposition happens through boring phone calls during loading screens.
If the plot won't keep you interested the gameplay might for a while, in spite of its extreme simplicity. The Conduit is as bland and generic as first-person shooters get: the action boils down to "shoot enemies along a corridor, press a button to open a door to another corridor, shoot the enemies, press a button to open the next door". It's as basic as Doom, but not in a good way. There is, however, some fun to be had in gunning down the many foes the game will generously throw at you, especially if you can get hold of some advanced weaponry. The arsenal is varied and mostly fun to fire. Aside from your standard line-up of machineguns and shotguns you'll get your hands on some organic alien weapons which are nothing new for a shooter fan, but will break the monotony of just pumping enemies full of lead all the time. You will also be able to use the ASE to reveal wall puzzles which in turn unlock secret doors leading to arsenal rooms containing upgraded versions of your weapons, which will give you the edge in battle but have very limited ammunition.
The function of the all seeing eye is to reveal hidden things, hack computers and deactivate cloaking devices on invisible enemies, but while this mechanic sounds great in theory, it has been poorly implemented: many times your progress will be halted by doors locked with an alien mechanism, requiring you to find a set number of invisible nodes around the room, which you will need to seek out and power up one by one by holding down the fire button. Even though the Wii remote rings up when you get close to one of these objects, it's still boring and time consuming to go hunting for them, considering they sometimes are in relatively large areas or even hidden behind breakable objects.
Another poor implementation of the ASE are the invisible mines. These buggers are explosive organisms that float in mid-air. They go off in your face when you approach them, cause massive damage and are, obviously, invisible, so whenever you hear the remote emit and alarm sound you will need to whip out the ASE, find the mine, get close but not too close and hold B down for a few seconds. Sounds harmless, but this is the only way to dispose of them (you can't just shoot them, even when you know where they are) and the level designers thought it would be a good idea to fill entire rooms with them, sometimes when swarmed by enemies you will need to stop, bring out the ASE and blow up the mines one by one while soldiers shoot you and aliens chew on your butt. When you think you're done and bring out your weapon again you'll most likely hear the alarm sound again indicating yet more mines up ahead. It's busywork, no wonder the aliens are called the Drudge.
Enemies will swarm you all the time: hidden in the most secluded nooks and alcoves, the programmers placed organic sacks that continuously respawn enemies just seconds after you kill them, or the aforementioned conduits that spawn alien soldiers armed with plasma guns. What you need to do is kill the enemies, then run as fast as you can to the spawn device and destroy it before it can spawn more and more. It's all right when you can see where enemies are coming from, but most of the time you'll spend minutes looking for the spawner while more enemies replace the ones you just took the time to dispatch. Oftentimes a spawner will be placed on the ceiling or in a pit below you, where you'll have trouble shooting, since you can't look all the way up or down, being your visual limited to a 45 degrees angle, for some reason.
Even though the aliens are ripped straight from Halo's Elites and the Protoss from Starcraft, enemies are pretty varied, ranging from mind controlled men in black and futuristic troopers to alien critters, alien soldiers, various types of flying creatures, aliens that heal their companions and even giant enemy crabs. There are some annoying ones though: no B-shooter is complete without the critters that rush you in the middle of combat and self-detonate, causing critical damage and generally a game over, or the enemy commandos that explode after death, with the same results. It's a standard feature for mediocre game design. The same can be said for sections with a time limit, which the game throws at you in more than one occasion.
Enemy AI is ridiculous: critters will do nothing but rush and you soldiers will systematically leave cover to run up to you and stand two feet away from you to shoot you in the face. When the exploding commandos do this it's really annoying, since you'll be forced to leave your safe spot to avoid the explosion. Even when they do hide behind cover they always stick their head out allowing easy headshots, they will sometimes lose sight of you even if you're in plain sight a few feet from them and will just turn tail and run away. It's something that was maybe acceptable in 2003, but in 2008 you hope for something better.
The game looks absolutely terrible, even in HD. Developer High Voltage boasted a game engine that made the game look as good as a 360 or PS3 game. It's a fat lie. While some alien enemies and weapon models look detailed enough, in order to do this they had to sacrifice environment details to the extreme: objects are incredibly blocky and textures are extremely blurry and low-res, so that enemies just stick out in comparison, like they belong in another game. The game actually looks worse than the original Halo, a 1999 game. This is PS2 quality. Actually there are better looking FPS on the PS2, like Killzone and Black. The music consists of a few seconds endlessly looped midis, sound effects are stock and artificial and voice acting is lazy and phoned-in. TV star Kevin Sorbo lent his voice to the character Prometeus, but he sometimes sounds so distracted you can clearly hear him pausing in the middle of a sentence while reading the next line on the script.
Despite the generic gameplay and low production values, what redeems the game are the controls, which work almost perfectly and are completely customizable (a rare feature on consoles, nowadays). You can even customize unusual details like the layout of the indicators on screen, camera behavior and even the character's walking speed, should you wish to. You'll notice the reload function is unresponsive at times, requiring multiple button presses to work, but all considered, control is the strongest point of the package and makes playing through the unexciting levels less aggravating.
On the default setting the campaign will last you around 5 hours, fortunately the game also comes with a multiplayer mode, which is competent in its own right, despite being extremely old school and stripped down to the basics. It works, which is good, and should provide you with a few more hours of entertainment.
A nice touch are the extras, like artworks and the cheats, which need to be unlocked by completing certain objectives, unsubtly called 'achievements', and give you unlimited ammo, one-hit kills and other fun perks, which may encourage you to replay the game.
In conclusion, The Conduit is a decent game, whose saving grace is the fact it's a Wii exclusive. Should it have seen a release on any other current home system it would have been universally panned as a complete disaster, but on the Wii The Conduit comes off as a fun little shooter. If the Wii didn't have such a small number of shooters when it came out, The Conduit would have found an even worse reception, but as it is it's worth a shot, even now that the FPS offer on the Wii has improved, with Call of Duty 4, Black Ops, Red Steel 2 and the Goldeneye remake. The Conduit wasn't absolutely worth the original $60 price of admission, but is definitely worth the $10 or so it costs today.