Conduit Review

Conduit

Wii

Inferno

The Conduit is a game for the Wii that will appeal to the conspiracy theorist in us all. You play as Michael Ford, a secret service agent who is recruited by a clandestine government organization known as the Trust. His first mission is to stop a terrorist known as Prometheus from getting away with a Trust artifact. Ford manages to defeat Prometheus’s men and recover the artifact known as the ASE, or All Seeing Eye. He is then sent to destroy Prometheus’ bunker under Washington. While clearing the hallways of the bunker, Ford stumbles upon an alien species known as the Drudge that Prometheus has been using as shock troops. Ford completes the mission successfully, but is told that he will no longer be needed, and is left for dead by the Trust.

The Conduit is a first person shooter, which means that you play seeing through the eyes of Mr. Ford. You don’t change characters, but that’s better in my opinion, because you don’t have to try to remember whom you’re playing as. However, your view is entirely customizable. Your can add and remove Items from your HUD(heads-up display), change their position on the screen, or remove the HUD all together. While this is nice for a cinematic effect, it’s slightly harder to play without seeing your health and ammo levels. To counteract this, a buzzer will go off when your health drops to critical levels, and the game automatically reloads when you run out of ammo. There are many other settings you can mess with, such as brightness, sensitivity, SFX and music levels and controls. Most controls can be swapped for one another, allowing for a very customizable experience.

I’ve only played a few matches in multiplayer, but from what I’ve played, it’s very fun. You can choose what your character looks like from a number of different models, including Mr. Ford and the Drudge. You can also change the color of their skin/armor to any color you want. When you finally get your character look decided on, you start looking for matches. There are a whole lot of matches generally. You can choose from three match types. A friend match means looking for any friends of yours that are playing and starting a match with them. Regional matches means a match with anyone in your general country. And International games are games with anyone from anywhere. Once the match is set up, you go to the lobby, where everyone votes on which stage they want and which weapon set they want, among other things. After 30 seconds, the game starts and you’re pitched headfirst into complete chaos. You spawn with the first two weapons in the weapon set and six grenades. If and when you’re killed, you switch to the view of whoever killed you for between 5 and 30 seconds depending on the settings, then you spawn in a randomly chosen spawn point across the map. After either the time limit runs out or there is only one man standing, again depending on the game settings, you are shown the scoreboard and returned to the lobby. This is just one of the types of matches, Deathmatch, but there are many others, like Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch and Bounty Hunter, but most of the options will be familiar to veterans of online games like Halo.

All in all, Conduit is a worthwhile buy, especially since it’s one of the only games of its kind for the Wii. There are only a couple of complaints I have for it, one being the length. There are ten levels, and each level takes about an hour to complete, so the game has an overall length of ten hours, but it still leaves you wanting more. My other complaint is the multiplayer. While it’s online settings are great, its split-screen settings are absent. I find this surprising, as there are quite a few people who don’t have a way to hook their Wii up to the internet. But other than that, this game is very solid, and will keep you occupied for a good long time. For those reasons, I give this game a 9/10.
image credit: www.fpstime.com