Reviews

The makers of The Conduit rightly felt that PS3/Xbox 360 owners were getting a better deal than Wii owners when it came to first-person shooters. Their solution? A first-person shooter designed just for the Wii.

Thankfully, The Conduit is easily the best Wii FPS outside of the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series. While it could never hope to compare with its heavyweight console brothers in terms of vivid background detail, the Quantum3 graphics engine performs very well. Everything moves at a fast pace with no lag or frame-dropping and the cursor moves so confidently that you can understand why makers High Voltage didn't bother integrating the game with the Wii Motion Plus. It wouldn't have added anything.

Near death or a damaged retina? You decide.

The player takes control of Secret Service Agent Michael Ford as he's inducted into the Trust; a shadowy organisation set up to fight terrorism. Ford is sent in to protect the President from his own agents, who are under some form of mind-control by a terrorist named 'Prometheus'. Ford must also recover stolen Trust technology, such as the All-Seeing Eye (more on this in a bit).

Let's be clear: apart from the Wii's motion controls, there's nothing particularly original about The Conduit. We've already had soldiers in bio-suits (Halo) and aliens from other dimensions invading our space established in games like Half-Life, Doom and even the recent Legendary. Meanwhile, "rescuing the President" is a phrase so often used in this genre that it would be far more interesting not to have Washington DC be the setting for once.

Enough of this alien fighting nonsense, let's find the President's secret stash of gold!

The ASE device may remind you of BioShock and Legendary, in that it's held out in your character's palm. By scanning walls and ceilings with this, you can find hidden Trust Data discs that unlock certain extras. There's also hidden writing on walls that hint at what caused the aliens (known as The Drudge) to invade.

Some doors have been sealed by an alien contraption that only unlocks after you've used the ASE to hunt down ghostly access points around the room. Similarly, to gain access to secret weapon stores, you need to uncover hieroglyphics and then rearrange the pieces into their correct sequence (this is so easy that it's rather pointless).