Alien Syndrome for Wii Reviews by Gamers

This game is fun but feels like a really close copy to the mechanics of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. So the game play will be familiar to most but has its own kicks with the Wii aiming and alien blasting.

Alien Syndrome is a game I wanted to be good. The Wii is a bit lacking in the mindless shoot-em-up category, and I thought AS would fill that gap nicely. After all, what could possibly go wrong when you have an ARPG loaded with thousands of items and hordes of alien scum for the slaughter?

A lot, apparently. AS is a game that was designed with the PSP in mind, and it shows. The camera remains fixedly zoomed-in on your character at all times, which is fine for a handheld, but when you have a big TV screen to look at, the extra space could have been used to show the area outside the ten foot box around your character. Instead, the camera remains frustratingly close, leading to vast amounts of guesswork when getting into battles with bosses you cannot see. Another disadvantage of the zoomed-in camera is that it mercilessly subjects you to graphics which would have been laughable on last-gen systems, nevermind the Wii.

The sound effects are annoying at best, the music is forgettable, the control scheme is okay, but uninspired (don't get me started on having to jab the Wiimote forward to thrust a melee weapon forward), the menus for customization of your character and item creation are just slightly less intuitive than accessing the internet by banging a rock against your monitor, and the "genetic mutation" is a poorly-designed exercise in frustration and should be avoided at all costs.

In my efforts to remain positive, I've been trying to think of ways to make this game fun, and have decided that the only way would be to take the disk out of the Wii, going outside, and using it as a frisbee.

Don't do that with Gamefly's disks, though. I'm pretty sure they frown on that.