"Saviour of hardcore Wii games!"

"The first Halo beater on Wii!"

"Best Wii game of 2009?"

Tjere are just some of the comments that people have been making about much anticipated Wii first person shooter The Conduit, but living up to these extreme expectations is next to impossible, even if Bungie had decided to create the new Halo on Wii instead of their home platform. Sadly though, The Conduit falls far, far short of its early promise.

Taking the role of Michael Ford, you work for a secret section of the government known as the Trust, who send you on a mission to retrieve an experimental weapon from enemy hands. You begin with very little knowledge of what is actually happening, which is intentional on the part of your commanding officer to distance you from the things that are going on behind closed doors. This continues throughout the game and comes across effectively at key moments when Ford demands to know the truth. The whole situation has a distinct air of Metal Gear about it, made even more noticeable by the 'codec' sequences that separate each of the missions, of which there are few. Other than the slight intrigue at times though, The Conduit's plot hints towards something it never becomes, rarely warranting much of your thinking time outside of the game. The story is forgettable while most of the rest of the game is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Split across nine short chapters, none of which last much more than half an hour, The Conduit takes you to the standard locations for a generic FPS; an abandoned warehouse, a library, train tunnels underground, an abandoned city - nowhere unexpected or surprising. Only the brief section in a faux White House gives any sense of atmosphere to the game, but even this suffers from the linear and repetitive level design that the game utilises. You never get lost in The Conduit; if you hear the sounds of aliens in the direction you're facing then more often than not that's the way to - and even then you can only ever go forward, with very minimal exploration available to you.

Once you're funnelled into a room, a barrage of enemies attacks following a trigger point; however, after the attack begins you can't pick them off from a distance - despite the plentiful long range weaponry at your disposal - because the titular conduits that are placed in strategically obvious places are spawn points for your foes, who continue to spawn until the conduit is destroyed. Consequently, pushing forward and risking an early death is vital to make it onto the next surprisingly familiar corridor and subsequent combat arena, and this continues for the whole of the game's five hours. If you're thinking that this sounds like Dreamcast-era game design (and even back then constant respawning, forced routes and claustrophobic battlegrounds were becoming a thing of the past) then sadly you're absolutely spot on. After a few levels it's easy to anticipate what enemy types will spawn - there are only a few notable ones to keep an eye on - and where you will find cover to hide behind, which makes the game feel repetitive throughout, despite the occasional section of brutal difficulty where you can die over and over again, making no headway at all.

One aspect of the game design that contributes to these frustrating sections is the device that you set out to recover. The ASE (All Seeing Eye) is activated by pressing + on the Wiimote, causing a glowing orb to allow you to interact with various electronic devices, blow up invisible mines and translate hidden inscriptions on walls. The moments where you must use this usually occur between combat segments, but more often than not you're forced to juggle between the two. There is one section for instance where you are busy fighting the alien horde and trying to avoid their one hit kill bullets when the Wiimote starts beeping uncontrollably to alert you to the proximity of a mine. It turns out that there are mines laid across the entire arena, but you can't see them unless you put your gun away and pull out your ASE to overcharge each mine and cause it to explode, an action that leaves you entirely defenceless. This becomes extremely annoying very quickly and often results in an untimely death, sending you back to the last checkpoint, sometimes one prior to a section you've completed or even a boss you've beaten.

The ASE is like a poor man's version of the visor in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, while the controls can be considered equal in both games. The controls are a development of those found in Corruption and despite the high levels of criticism I've levelled thus far, there's no denying that The Conduit plays like a dream. You have just enough control over where you target before the camera moves and pointing at the screen in such a way feels so natural now. Shooting with the Wiimote feels right, and the way the controls are mapped to the various other buttons on the Wiimote and nunchuk mean that it's never a chore to mow down enemies. The weapons are responsive, if a little on the boring side, and you can pop off headshots with pinpoint precision.

This aspect of the game was essential if The Conduit was going to become the first true online FPS on Wii, and because of the tight controls, online play can be a lot of fun. There are a multitude of options on offer here, from deathmatch to a mission-based team mode, with around eight maps and a variety of options to tinker with. The maps themselves are variations on the environments in the main game, but sadly the twelve-player matches are too small to fill them. The real fun comes from the brief moments where all twelve players are battling it out in one small section of the map; however, walking around trying to find the action is not much fun. That aside, there hasn't been a multiplayer mode as fully featured in a Wii FPS yet, and The Conduit has set the standard fairly high in this regard.

On a technical level The Conduit is also impressive, just below the quality seen in Metroid. Intricately designed textures and complicated lighting make this a technical marvel, but sadly the lack of any real artistic hook makes the visuals a tad disappointing. There's nothing here that we haven't seen a dozen times in other sci-fi shooters, with very little thought put into most aspects of the design, from the enemies to the environments. The audio is decent enough, though barely heard over the sheer amount of noise coming from the Wiimote while playing most sections, while the music suits the mood but rarely does anything to enhance the atmosphere. The guns lack that pop that weaponry needs in an FPS too, but it's hardly noticeable when gunning down the myriad aliens.

If you expected The Conduit to be the Wii's Halo 3 or Gear of War 2, then prepare for a major disappointment. As a Wii game it's way beyond every other FPS on the system (other than Metroid ) in terms of controls and graphical fidelity, but when compared to the full breadth of the FPS genre, Conduit is more akin to TimeShift and Haze. It has little visual style and the sumptuous graphics are wasted on tired, uninspired design. "Generic" is probably the best word to describe The Conduit in single player, although it at least proves that you can pull off true online multiplayer experiences on Wii, even if some elements could have been improved. Next time around, whether that comes from High Voltage Software or another developer, if all of these elements come together with some well thought out design and fresh ideas, we could have something very special. For now though, The Conduit falls far short of the near perfection that the hardcore community were hoping for.

Reviewed by Sam Atkins for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).