Developer: CAPCOM | Publisher: Nintendo | Released: 18th January 2008 | Price paid: £27.93 | Bought at: ASDA

Zack & Wiki has come into this world to much anticipation from fans of games that aren't rubbish, possibly largely due to the fact that CAPCOM seem to be calling it a 'Puzzle Adventure Game' and it's about Pirates, which makes people think of Monkey Island and therefore want it. Well you know what? This game is nothing like Monkey Island. Well apart from the pirates...

For a start, ignore anyone who mentions the word Adventure when describing this game. The point-and-click control method makes it feel a bit like the great PC Adventure games of old, but it's not an adventure game at all. It's a little bit like an adventure game, if you took an adventure game and removed everything apart from the puzzles, so basically it's just a puzzle game. The game is divided into stages, usually with a large puzzle or overall goal with several small puzzles to solve to achieve it. It's all about the puzzles and, let's be honest, they're the best bit about adventure games anyway, so you'll spend more time solving (Or not solving) puzzles and less time wandering around doing nothing or talking to people who constantly say the same thing.

The main 'hook' of the game, I suppose you could say, is Wiki's ability to turn into a bell, which can be rung by Zack to turn living things into items to either use on puzzles, or simply move them to another place, where you can ring the bell again to turn them back to normal. Most of the puzzles revolve around this ability and you'll sometimes have to stop an enemy to turn them into an item, to use to get to another item so that you can get to another item... It's brilliant when a level comes together in your mind, since the goal of all the levels is essentially the same, with only the way you achieve it being different in each one. There are some really difficult puzzles in there too, so it's not a game you can just breeze through without thinking. There are other secret things to find in the game too, but you don't get anything for finding them, and they're really boring to find, so you probably won't bother unless you're a complete 100% nut.

The way the Wiimote is used is particularly clever in this game, and it's probably one of the best examples of how it should be used. Various items and actions in the game use the Wiimote in very realistic ways, and some of them just feel genious, especially the ones that use the buttons on the controller in addition to the motion controls. It's the sort of thing you really want to ask people about, 'Ah, do you remember that bit- with the- yeah! And then you have to- Ah, yeah that was brilliant!'. I won't spoil it though. Lots of them really do feel like you're using the item in question, and it always feels much smoother than a lot of other games where the motion sensing is a bit dodgy. Unfortunately a lot of them are just based on gestures, but there are quite a few that use proper motion sensing, and they always feel much better than the gestures.

Now the game doesn't have any kind of health-bar, so the enemies come in two forms; Ones that do pretty much nothing, and ones that kill you instantly, forcing you to restart the level. This isn't so much of a problem near the beginning of the game, where the main challenge is figuring out which items to use or how to use them and the levels feel far more clever and far more fun. The game seems to trail of a bit towards the end though, and on some levels you'll just be dying constantly. The worst bits are the times where there's no way you could know about something unless you've already done it once, and so there are parts where you seemingly HAVE to die to complete a level, which just feels annoying. As well as that there are some levels where using an item in the wrong way or place will mean you can't complete it at all and you'll have to restart. The game doesn't actually tell you that though, so sometimes you might just be wandering around trying to figure out what to do when you literally can't do anything.

Unfortunately this is basically how they made the game 'harder' towards the end, just throwing more things at you that can instantly kill you, which is a bit of a disappointment. Some of the harder puzzles actually come towards the beginning or middle of the game, so the later level just became a bit frustrating. Now there is a shop in which you can use money you find in the levels to buy either Oracle Dolls (Which give you hints on how to proceed through the level) or Platinum Tickets (Which allow you to retry a level from wherever you were before you died). I don't know about you but I absolutely despise using money on anything consumable like that in games, so I refused to buy any until right near the end of the game when I became incredibly annoyed with a particular level. I suppose the later levels might have been slightly less frustrating if I had chosen to use the tickets from the beginning, but even so they don't come cheap, and each one you buy makes the next more expensive, so it's probably not a good idea to use any early on in the game.

The story is also pretty awful, which is odd because games labeled Adventure games usually have pretty decent stories. The game is basically a quest to recover a bunch of pieces of a golden skeleton because a golden skull asked you to and you have nothing better to do, complete with a ridiculously obviously plot 'twist', a bunch of pretty generic settings and N64-style 'one word that sort of has something to do with the sentence' voice acting throughout. It's all very bright and cuddly to fit with the cel-shaded graphics, which are relatively impressive for a Wii game, but still nothing special. There also seemed to be random frame-rate drops at some points, but it was usually during things like cut-scenes so it didn't affect that actual gameplay too much thankfully.

In the end though, it's still all about the puzzles, and they are brilliant, with some really good use of the Wiimote thrown in for good measure. It's unfortunate that the game trails off so much near the end, but thankfully it comes back at the very last moment, parrying your entire 15-hit super combo and delivering a joyous combo of a final level right into your face. It seems CAPCOM still know how to do things right, and though the game's not perfect, and probably not a system-seller, it's definitely a good, fun work out for the brain. Better than all this Brain Training nonsense anyway...