mgroves

Elebits is a vaguely Katamari-ish game for the Nintendo Wii in which you ransack your house in an attempt to find these little electricity producing creatures called Marklars. Wait, I mean Elebits.

You play the role of some dopey kid, desperate for his parent’s attention and jealous of elebits. You get some sort of Ghostbusters gun that acts as a lifting device that gets stronger the more elebits you find and capture (with the gun).

If you’ve ever played Psi-Ops for the PC or Xbox, the game is basically like that. Except that you can pick up and toss around a lot more stuff. If Konami had a name for this game that came in second place to “Elebits”, it would probably be “Wreck Up the Place” (either that or “Super Happy Kid Shoot Lift Revolution”), because that’s basically what you do is pick up the furniture and dishes and hair dryers and throw them all over the house in a desperate attempt to find Elebits.

After a good 4-5 hours of gameplay, I gotta say that this is perhaps my favorite game for the Wii as of right now. After you pass a level, you can replay that level without a timer. I played in this mode for a good hour, just throwing crap around. The game has more features and unlockable features than you can shake a lifter gun at, including screenshots (that you can send to your Wii friends), edit mode (where you can create your own levels, and send them to Wii friends), multiplayer mode, etc.

I’m a puzzle game fan, I admit, and this game is exactly what I’ve been looking for in the Wii.

Things I like about this game:

• Throwing crap around. This is so much fun that it makes me giggle like a 13 year old girl at a Skillet concert.
• The game mechanics. You can’t throw around the piano right away, first you gotta throw around a few potted plants and electric drills. THEN you can smash the piano into the LCD TV.
• The powerups. You can get a homing gun, noise damper, crazy elebits knock-out thingy, and a bunch of other stuff. To use a powerup, you grab it and throw it around until you smash it. Tee hee!

Things I don’t like about it:

• Opening doors. You have to aim for the door handle, turn the Wiimote, and then pull/push. It sounds simple, but it’s ridiculously cumbersome. And the doors don’t even stay open whether you want them to or not.
• Tiny rooms. Some of the rooms are small and packed full of stuff, so it’s hard to manuever the camera around to find the elebits. Throwing crap around in the room only makes it worse, but I really can’t help myself.
• Voice acting & storyline. Weird, creepy, sad. Fortunately, it’s meaningless to the game, so just skip it.
• Aiming reticle. The same problem as I’ve mentioned before: the cursor can go off the screen. WHY? It’s so much of a pain.

Verdict: A! This is a great game for puzzle fans or for fans of throwing crap around for no reason. I highly recommend at least a rent, but you’ll need to own it to experience all the depth of play.

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