Lawrence.com

When the Wii was announced, many people thought it could potentially be a go-to system for first person shooters, but that definitely hasn't been the case. While Metroid Prime 3 and Medal of Honor proved that the genre could indeed control well with the Wii remote, the system hasn't revolutionized it in the way many had hoped. That's why The Conduit seemed to gain a lot of buzz in the last year or so - it looked like a semi-mature FPS, and promised incredible motion controls. While the control is definitely solid, the game around it is generic and uninspired.

You'll find out very quickly that The Conduit is poorly presented. The voice acting is laughable and the story is in the generic "federal agents and aliens" vein. While the levels will whisk you from location to location, there isn't much that happens to shake up the gameplay.

As a tech demonstration of the Wii's ability to handle FPS games, it's great. Playing the game feels intuitive and natural, except for the melee controls being mapped to the forward thrust motion. Luckily, every single action in the game can be customized to whatever button or motion you'd like, and you can even tinker with more advanced settings like the invisible "box" that determines when you turn. The level of customization is very welcome, and ensures that gamers can set things up exactly how they'd like.

The Conduit features online multiplayer, but I doubt it'll have many gamers coming back for more. It's as generic as the rest of the game, and will get tiresome within 5 minutes for anyone who has ever played Call of Duty (or most any FPS from the current generation of consoles). If it were released in the late 90s it would have been great, but the genre has gotten so much deeper and more complex in recent years. By comparison, The Conduit can't hold up.

An exclusive, quality FPS is something the Wii has needed for a while, and The Conduit is not it. It has the controls, but everything else is dull and uninspired. If this game were to be released with standard controls on another console, it wouldn't have even shown up on most gamer's radars.

Graphics: 7.0

Sound: 7.0

First Play: 7.5

Replay Value: 4.0

Gameplay: 6.0

Overall: 6.7