High Voltage is here to prove a point. Yes, it wants to entertain, innovate, engross, and all the other things that developers like to do, but with The Conduit it really has something to say. For too long, Wii owners have had to make do with the stylised worlds of Super Mario Galaxy and Zack & Wiki. For too long, game studios have stood idly by as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have monopolised the hardcore first-person shooter. In High Voltage’s vision of a perfect world, every gamer should be able to mow down brainless enemies in drab subterranean bunkers. The Conduit is less a game and more a humanitarian initiative.

We’re being flippant, of course, but it’s difficult to approach The Conduit in any other way. Back in the early months of 2008, some bright spark in the marketing department of either High Voltage or Sega evidently decided to promote this game on the strength of its technical proficiency. They took a look at the console and a look at the studio’s talent, and felt The Conduit would flourish in direct comparison with Call Of Duty, Killzone, and their super-powered brethren – to them, it was the one thing world of Wii was missing.

This is a flawed concept for two very good reasons: first, Wii’s been on the market for three years, and any Wii-owner with a penchant for visually splendid hardcore shooters will have tired of the endless shovelware and very likely bought a console that actually supports them. Second, it would take a truly brilliant use of Wii hardware to support the claims made by The Conduit’s pre-release hype, but the game falls dramatically short of its ambitions on virtually every level.

Quite frankly, High Voltage has achieved little more than Ubisoft’s Red Steel did at the console’s launch. No doubt there are reams of technical details that prove The Conduit’s technical prowess, but we’re gamers, not programmers, and on an experiential level there’s nothing to tell them apart. In our ideal world, Metroid Prime 3’s elegant and creative solutions to the lack of horsepower would become a textbook for all future Wii FPSs. Mark Twain was right: history doesn’t repeat itself, but occasionally it rhymes.

The plot is no better or worse than any number of sci-fi shooters: a mysterious alien race is flooding through equally mysterious conduits into a near-future Washington DC, and as special agent Michael Ford it’s your duty to solve the mystery, kicking asses as you go. There’s a conspiracy element to the narrative that could have heightened the drama, but the game is in such a rush to reach the next firefight that the entire story is treated as an afterthought; confined to stilted phone conversations between levels, and barely mentioned at all during gameplay.

High Voltage clearly has no use for downtime as a way of controlling the pace and creating tension, but The Conduit would have been more rewarding with more attention paid to ambience and atmosphere. There are some satisfying surprises to be found among the alien enemy types and their technology (see ‘Grow Some Balls, Man!’), but the levels are so claustrophobic that gunfights are rarely given a chance to breathe, making tactical thinking virtually redundant.

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