The Conduit

Review - A sci-fi epic... fail

Newly recruited into the ranks of shadowy government organisation The Trust, Secret Service agent Michael Ford is tasked with hunting down Prometheus, a former Trust scientist labelled a terrorist for stealing technologically advanced device the All Seeing Eye (ASE) and working in league with The Drudge, a species of insectoid aliens using conduit portals to attack Washington D.C. However, with the ASE safely in his possession, Agent Ford soon finds himself targeted for assassination by The Trust, only to be saved through the timely intervention of the mysterious Prometheus. Caught in a web of conspiracy, unsure who to trust, and armed with the otherworldly ASE, Agent Ford is left following the direction of a suspected terrorist while battling both The Trust and The Drudge at every turn.

In promising Wii owners a white-knuckle science fiction adventure that unfolds around a well-worn alien invasion premise, High Voltage Software's The Conduit instantly leaves itself open for unavoidable comparison against a long line of genre titles that offer vastly similar thrills. So, facing a lengthy yardstick of quality with the likes of Halo 2 shining at one end and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty cowering from view at the other, where on the scale of critical assessment does The Conduit fall? And is this the first-person shooter Nintendo fans have supposedly been waiting for?

Despite considerable pre-release expectation built on the back of favourable tradeshow chatter and preview appraisal, The Conduit quickly reveals itself to be a quite shocking disappointment on a number of levels. Specifically, in a time when many modern shooters deliver detailed destructibility, opportunities for exploration, narrative depth, and even elements of RPG evolution, The Conduit offers none of the above in favour of relying on antiquated and blinkered gameplay that pushes the boundaries of tolerable linearity to the point of being an on-rails coin-op.

Moreover, fighting The Drudge aliens and The Trust's mindless human puppets through a subway station, sewage system, an airport terminal and supposedly iconic landmarks such as the White House and the Pentagon means the player spends much of the game being pushed relentlessly from room to room and corridor to corridor. Such a lack of scope and ambition might be forgivable if the aforementioned battlegrounds didn't so obviously exude a poorly textured desire to herd Agent Ford from one confined and lifeless encounter to the next. Lifeless, not just in the sense that The Conduit's action is often without impact, but lifeless insofar as the developer has chosen to forego the inclusion of genuine immersion.

For example, Washington D.C. is a sizable city being overrun by invading aliens, but restricting player progress to tight interiors means never having to truly show the U.S. capital or the pockets of resistance likely playing out within it. Also, the Pentagon is the largest office building in the world, but a convenient evacuation order means the player only ever gets to face the incessant charge of enemies while battling along its painfully plain rinse and repeat corridors. And, just to drive the point home, the game rarely portrays the scars of war. An alien species is invading the planet but, aside from the odd abandoned tank and blown-out wall, there are no bodies strewn about the place, there are no blast scars and no craters. Neither is there the sound of distant gunfire, the ominous rumble of explosions or the anguished cries of human desperation in the face of possible extinction. I'm over egging the pudding, but you get the idea.

The shoddy design choices aren't just restricted to the environments either, with both The Trust and The Drudge throwing largely generic, poorly animated and A.I. deficient foes into the player's path from start to finish. And to further highlight The Conduit's other related shortfalls, many of The Drudge foot soldiers are voiced by guttural growls and high-pitched squeals seemingly lifted directly from Halo's Elite and Grunt units, while character movement lacks fluidity, jagging is often rife, and collision detection is sometimes so bad that it's not unusual to watch as enemies become trapped within solid walls or actually struggle their way through immoveable objects and closed doors.

The truly sad part of having to strap on a pair of hob-nailed review boots and set about kicking seven shades out of The Conduit is that it clearly has so much unrealised potential. More pointedly, its Wii Remote and Nunchuk control system takes first-person shooters to a whole new level in terms of attuned accuracy and sensitivity, ably showcasing that Nintendo's motion-sensing technology is more than capable of giving PC-based FPS games a run for their money. However, the strength of The Conduit's control system is all-but wasted on the unfulfilling content that it's been created to support.

Similarly, the All Seeing Eye (ASE), which is available as a peripheral device alongside a passable mixed arsenal of human and alien weaponry, is an intriguing addition that fails to make its mark due to High Voltage Software's lack of imagination. Looking not unlike Halo's treacherous 343 Guilty Spark, the ASE is an advanced portable device that can be used to translate (pointless) alien messages scrawled on walls, uncover (banal) Trust puzzle symbols that unlock secret weapons caches, and also alert Agent Ford as he approaches nearby (visibly) invisible mines. While clearly holding the potential to be an impressively multifaceted piece of kit, the ASE is used as little more than a glorified magic torch and sadly offers no form of upgradeable offensive or defensive assistance during battles. In fact, the ASE is often more of an interactive hindrance as Agent Ford must always shoulder his equipped weapon before sweeping an area with the device - plus, the reward is rarely worth the required effort.

According to the rear cover of The Conduit's packaging, the game won an IGN E3 Award in 2008, and was lauded as the "BEST SHOOTING GAME ON THE Wii," by the prominent online videogame magazine. However, taken in context, E3 2008 was more than a year ago, when The Conduit was far from finished. It's now the end product that's being evaluated, not an ongoing preview build, and, as such, The Conduit is far from the best shooting game on the Wii. That honour, for better or worse, still belongs to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Superb controls aside, when properly assessed by the FPS genre's merciless yardstick of quality, The Conduit echoes the same linear design disappointments as Resistance: Fall of Man and finds itself languishing uncomfortably close to Turning Point: Fall of Liberty in terms of dour quality.

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