Well, that may be a little harsh there, using a headline like "Wing Island Sucks", but after reading my pal Phil's review of the new Nintendo Wii game over at AMN I think the label is justified. If you're joining us late, Wing Island is a flight adventure game that many first assumed was a revival of Super NES and Nintendo 64 fan favorite Pilotwings (mostly because both games feature a similar l'il red biplane). Then we found out that the game is actually a Hudson production and that Konami would handle publishing the game in North America. Okay, so it's not Pilotwings, but it could still be fun, right? Guess not.
Wing Island comes off as bare bones and rushed – a product that only children could enjoy, and we’re not even convinced about that statement. There just isn’t much to the game. It’s flying around in circles – in some pretty boring levels. Over and over and over. We want to like the game. It’s innocent, in a way, and we certainly can’t “hate” it.
Usually, we don’t take a game’s price into consideration in the process of reviewing software. However, with titles like this one, we can’t help but wonder what the hell is going on at the game’s publisher, Konami. The title’s priced at $39.99, 10 dollars under the traditional price of Wii software, but it’s still horribly overpriced. Maybe we would be able to say “this is a fun game and might be worth playing around with” if it was 10 bucks, but at its current price, we simply can’t recommend anything but to not bother with it.
So much for that then. I don't think I've we've ever scored a game this low at AMN. I could be wrong about that (I don't read everything), but I believe this is the first time I've seen our uncoveted "glass totally empty" graphic in place of a gold, silver, or bronze medal. I've even seen my share of the "rental only" graphic, but never a "glass totally empty". Indeed, to win that "award" a game must truly contain a special level of suck.
