We get to play the hotly-anticipated Wii first-person shooter.
Got to play the Conduit yesterday afternoon and the rest of the staff wanted me to write this one up myself at the expense of posting speed.
First thing I noticed going into the game was how fantastic it looked. There's a lot of detail and everything's sharp and polished, the High Voltage guys really have something for an engine here. Best of all the world isn't all dark and gray like you see so often with new tech. There's normal mapping on the characters, and the character and weapon models are quite impressive looking. The environment textures are a bit bland right now but that's mostly just in comparison to the great lighting effects and character models and stuff -- still better than most stuff on Wii, easily.
The game is, in essence, a sci-fi themed first-person shooter, a horridly under-represented genre on the Wii. Metroid Prime 3 is the only decent game that even comes close, and that's a much slower paced adventure game. The Conduit is fast and action-packed. The controls for The Conduit have been ripped basically straight out of Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and that's a very good thing. In its simplicity, you just point and shoot. Everything else is fully customizeable. Any action can be mapped to any button or motion. Many different settings such as the size of the dead zone, the cursor sensitivity, the turning speed, and even whether or not pressing and releasing the duck button will cause you to stay down, or if you have to hold the button down to stay in a ducking position. Overall it's the first game so far to combine great looking graphics and extremely tight first-person shooting controls in a hectic, action-heavy experience.
The story is pretty generic fare, centered around an alien invasion in Washington DC. The High Voltage guys have said that you'll be visiting various recognizable DC landmarks in some form throughout the game. The story will be delivered by recorded video news broadcasts intermittently, as well as voice communications from your commanders. The Conduit isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, but rather bring a really spiffy wheel to the Wii for the first time.
There are three types of weapons. Human weapons are the standard pistol and rifle types. Trust weapons are those from the secret government that has known about and been preparing for the alien invasion. Alien weapons will look and feel truly alien, with insect-like appearances, and often will appear to be moving or breathing. One such weapon is a laser-guided alien missile, which after launch will continue to follow your cursor on the screen until impact. Another weapon is the Deatomizer, which normally shoots out simple electric bolts but when charged sends out twin bolts like an electric bola. When one bolt strikes an object, the other swings around as if they two were attached by a chain. Best of all you can control the angle between the two bolts by twisting the Wii remote before firing, a clever use of the tilt sensing. You can only carry two weapons at the same time, and all weapons of a type (Human, Trust, Alien) will share the same ammo. There are, of course, grenades in addition to the regular weaponry, including the normal explosive kind, flash bangs that stun enemies, and sticky radiation grenades that do persistent damage.
Another gameplay feature is the All-Seeing Eye, an object that reveals hidden things to you. You'll occassionally receive an indication that the ASE might help you out, and it can reveal a tumbler puzzle interface on the wall leading to hidden weapons and ammo, or hidden enemies that can only be destroyed when revealed with the ASE but have no problems attacking you before that. There will be some minor puzzles like this throughout the game to add some variety to the gameplay.
Aliens will be littered throughout the environment as you progress. You can also lock on to enemies, which will help stabilize and center your camera (similar to how targeting works in Metroid Prime 3) and also show the enemy's health and range. There will also be swirling portals (one of the many "conduit" references in the game) which will inifinitely respawn alien attackers until destroyed, similar to the mechanic used in Gauntlet. Best of all was the boss fight, a huge monster that requires some strategy to beat -- a strategy which I miserably failed at despite the game being set to easy mode. This particular boss absolutely destroys anything in close range, so your only chance is to stay back and hide behind the nearby cars for cover. But you can't stay still, because the boss also shoots out missiles and flying enemies to go after you. Me? I couldn't handle the intricacies of jumping and ducking and shooting and running all at the same time, but I just suck at games as I've mentioned before. Just read my Mega Man 9 hands-on -- took me four tries to get over the first jump.
Anyway, back to the Conduit. As you probably know by now, there will be online multiplayer. They're shooting for as many players as possible while maintaining a high quality experience -- currently that number is 16, but could change in either direction. There is no local splitscreen multi-player, due to technical challenges and the desire to make the core game as good as possible. Online play will have as many of the traditional game modes as they can fit in, while ensuring that each one meets their high standards. Also, with the recent announcement of WiiSpeak, the High Voltage guys have decided to add in voice chat. We're all hoping someone figures out how to hack a headset into the speakerphone though.
Update: Forgot to mention this earlier, but they're looking into leaving in LAN play, which they already have in the game so they can test out multiplayer themselves while they work on the online system.
As for MotionPlus, they said they'll look at it but hadn't heard anything about it until yesterday morning, which is pretty much in line with what other developers have been saying. There's not much motion control in the game now and they're not going to shoehorn anything in just to make use of another feature. As for any discussion about friend codes, the official party line is "No comment", which when translated appeared to mean they're banging their heads against Nintendo's online wall.
Anyway there's everything I know about the game, which is probably less than you know by now, but there it is. I'll be trying to get my hands on some exclusive screens for you guys in the next week or two as well.
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=1522
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