A bland, generic, and derivative shooter with no redeamable value
It seems that developer High Voltage Software wasn't able to ascertain the secret to making a successful shooter. Their first attempt at tackling the genre, The Conduit, is a good technical showcase, but it falls flat in just about every conceivable way. From a dull, uninteresting story full of cliches, to derivative, less than stellar gameplay, The Conduit just doesn't deliver.
The story is your typical sci-fi, government conspiracy that doesn't go anywhere or do anything other than to serve as a reason for shooting stuff. All you need to know is that an alien force called "the Drudge" is invading the US via portals called Conduits, and its your job, as secret service agent Michael Ford, to stop 'em. This entails shooting waves of Drudge forces and destroying the Conduits from which they stem from, and finding hidden objects, mines, and other things via a sphere called the all-seeing eye.
The game mainly revolves around shooting everything that moves, as well as a few things that don't move too (i.e. spawn points), and completing objectives along the way. Though they all boil down to things like get to this area, clear the area of enemies, hack that terminal, etc. You know, the usual. They're all easy to complete, and don't present much a challenge, though that's mostly due to stupidity of your enemies.
Most of the time they're smart enough to get behind cover, and attack in groups, which makes them a little harder to kill, and harder to complete any objectives in the area, but there were multiple times when enemies ran right past me as though I wasn't there, allowing me to bypass them completely. It's like I was invisible or something!
When they aren't acting like you don't exist, the enemies put up enough of a fight to a bit of a challenge, but they still aren't the smartest guys in the world. Enemies have impeccable aim, and will kill you with ease if you try run-'n'-gun tactics, which makes certain encounters very difficult to overcome because of how hectic the action gets.
But if you've got cover or a good place to run back to, you'll easily overcome those encounters. See, enemies have a tendency to stay where they are and wait for you to come to them. They never try to pursue you or anything, even after spotting you, they just sit there waiting for you pop your head out, which means you can just retreat and regenerate your health whenever things get too hairy. This, in conjunction with the many health packs dropped by enemies, makes health seldom become an issue.
Of course, that won't stop you from dieing multiple times throughout the game. In addition to the usual onslaughts of enemies, there will come times when you're tasked with defusing invisible mines that make you a sitting duck whilst you wait to defuse them, while fighting off hoards of enemies with little to no cover. It's not a terribly common instance, but its a cruel one nonetheless.
It doesn't help that the controls only make matters worse, though. The game uses the Wii remote to control the reticle, and the nunchuck controls movement and grenade throwing. It works well and is very intuitive, and things like the sensitivity of the cursor, the dead zone, button placement, etc. are completely customizable, which is cool, but no matter how much you edit it, it never feels right.
Turning around feels sluggish, which makes those moments where the game gets hectic a very annoying, frustrating experience because enemies will sometimes suddenly appear behind you, and then kill you soon after, because you can't turn around fast enough to find and defeat them. The lock-on system randomly targets enemies in the vicinity, including off-screen ones, which is more annoying than helpful when facing down multiple opponents, and is quite disorienting.
The game also has a decent multiplayer component featuring three game types that up to 12 players can shoot each other in: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Team Objective, which is a Capture the Flag type game with the flag being substituted for an ASE. Finding and getting into matches is easy and doesn't take too long (a few minutes at the least, several at the most). The hard part is finding matches that aren't complete lagfests, or staying connected long enough to actually get a game going.
During my time with it, I had lot of instances where I would be disconnected from the game mid-match, end up in some area off the game map where I couldn't do anything, and have plenty of lag during games. I did get into some games that ran fine, but they seldom came up, which left the online mostly broken during my time with it.
The Conduit has the distinction of being one of the few technical showcases on the Wii, though its generic, and boring art direction mar its beauty. The levels mostly consist of a bunch of tight, dull looking corridors and rooms that all look very similar. There are a few outdoor areas, but your time is mostly spent walking through alleyways, so you don't get much time to admire the work they did on making DC look like it really had been under siege. Cars aflame, building debris is scattered all over, and the general deserted look and feel effectively convey the damage caused by the invasion. Enemies, on the other hand, look like they were taken right out your typical alien flick. Their insect-like design feels generic, and isn't terribly interesting looking.
With loads of wasted potential, The Conduit is left being a derivative mess of a game that, despite a somewhat decent multiplayer component, is nothing more than a waste of time. With so many other, better shooters on the market, its hard to recommend The Conduit to even the most starved first-person shooter fan.
