Hands-on with The Conduit

Talk about a flashback. For a moment there, standing at the High Voltage booth during E3, waiting for my appointment to see Brink at the Bethesda booth, I thought I was playing some Nintendo 64 with my fellow pre-pubescent friends, eating Air Heads directly out of the bulk bag, waiting for Star Trek Voyager to come on.

This is because The Conduit, in all of it's promises, looks and feels like a title for... the Nintendo 64! I'm not blaming the developers here because it's far too often lately that a title for the Wii appears to have been ported from the N64. But I digress... the way a game looks says little about the way a game plays (let's you and me talk about Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles later).

The Conduit, from SEGA and High Voltage, is a game in which humanity has lost a war of some sort with some aliens of some sort. The trailer makes it look more like a Hollywood action movie than a game. I appreciated that, because otherwise it would look like a generic shooter.

I was able to play multi-player with a few others, early morning. Some luckier media folk other than myself got a chance to do just that earlier. I took up the Wiimote and felt immediately at home. Unlike other Wii titles, this doesn't feel like it's guiding you. Rather, you're guiding it. Is that strange to say? We played in a decimated Washington D.C. map, with random weapons lying about, some of alien origin controlled by a rotating, glowing ball, and grenades that were flung by flinging the nunchuk attachment towards the screen.

If you are a fan of Quake or Team Fortress, you're going to enjoy this. The problem I have with it is that it doesn't bring anything new to multi-player. The object is to kill, or steal the flag, or hold an area for as long as possible, and frankly it's getting a little old.

The Conduit promises a deep single-player story, however, and for my money it feels worth it for that alone. But if you're looking for a new multi-player experience, you might want to keep looking -- towards The New Super Mario Bros., for instance.