As fun as the physics can be, the in-game graphics leave a lot to be desired. There's certainly a charm to the game's look--the cuteness of the worlds and the elebits--but technical performance gets in the way quite a bit. Environments are colorful, but textures look extremely drab and muddy, to the point where Elebits looks like a first-generation GameCube game. And even with these low-res visuals, the frame rate seems unable to keep up with what's going on in the game. This is less of an issue indoors, but the second you get into any of the outdoor levels, the game chunks up severely. Charm goes a long way, but not enough to forgive the one-two punch of dingy textures and bad frame rates. The voice acting is the worst part of the game's audio, but the rest of it is quite good. The soundtrack is nicely varied and features some catchy electronic tunes, and the kitten cries of the elebits as you capture them are rather cute, if a bit disturbing.

The physics engine lets you do some pretty kooky stuff with the various objects scattered throughout a level.

Elebits is a pretty breezy game. Since the bulk of the gameplay is hide-and-go-seek with a laser gun, the challenge is less in shooting stuff and more in simply finding all the necessary elebits. But even that isn't especially tough. Elebits don't do much to run away once they're found, and it's just a matter of pointing and shooting at them. A few elebits do attack you, but they aren't typically the collectible ones anyway, so all you really need to do is avoid them. You'll bust through the game's story mode in under six hours and fail maybe one or two stages during the entire course of the mode. This applies to the few boss fights that pop up as well, which are perhaps even easier than the normal stages. Bosses have very specific, very easily discernable patterns that become obvious right away, so they're good for little more than a quick distraction from the usual tasks.

Though the game is simple, there's an oddly compelling quality to the action. Hunting elebits becomes addictive after a while, especially once you start picking up some of the neat power-ups that let you target multiple elebits, or attract them to one spot, or vacuum them up en masse via a whirlwind that sends all the inanimate objects in close proximity into a crazed frenzy. You also have the option to go back and play any stage over again to try to achieve a higher score, and there are score attack and challenge mode options as well, which impart some new conditions on old stages.

Once you've completed the story mode, there's a four-player multiplayer mode to mess with. This mode lets you and up to three other friends go at it in a level, both competing and cooperating to catch elebits. It's a strange and screwy mode in the way it tries to balance competitive and cooperative play. Only the host player can move around, so that player is in control of what displays on the playing field, but everyone is competing to score as many watts as possible, so you basically have to both rely on and compete against the host player. It's pretty sloppy, a fact made all the more visible by how chaotic the multiplayer gets in four-player mode. It's near on impossible to see who is shooting what in this mode, and because only one player gets to move the camera around, if you get in the lead, you could feasibly just stand still in a spot where there are no more elebits to collect and wait out the timer. That's not just dumb; that's broken.

The level editor is a nice touch.

The game's edit mode is more enjoyable. This mode lets you build your own levels to play around with. You can only use the basic single-player stage designs, but within them, you can place objects and elebits just about anywhere you'd like. The system is relatively easy to use, and best of all, you can trade created levels with your friends via the WiiConnect24 system. Granted, you have to have someone's friend code in order to do anything, and there's a weird limit of one trade per day imposed, but otherwise, this is a cool addition that definitely gives the game some legs.

You'll come away from Elebits with an interesting mix of reactions. The motion controls are nicely done, and the puzzle nature of the levels can be quite addictive. But as cool as Elebits can be, it's rarely the game part of it that really stands out. Elebits' technology is what drives it--the combination of the motion controls and the hearty physics engine turns what is, in essence, a pretty simple kids' game into something greater than the sum of its parts. It's certainly not going to be for everyone, but any Wii owner on the hunt for something new and original would do well to give it a look.