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IGN Review of Flingsmash
Video games are, first and foremost, supposed to be fun to play. Flingsmash is not. This game may have all the makings of a fun design: swing the Wii MotionPlus-enhanced remote to "smash" your ball-like character into bricks, items, and pick-ups to score points and move onto the next challenge. In practice this is easily one of the dullest titles in Nintendo's first-party line-up. Flingsmash has been relegated as a bonus game with the new Wii RemotePlus much in the way Wii Play was with the original Wii Remote, but Flingsmash can't even live up to Nintendo standards as a ten dollar extra.
It really feels like the FlingSmash concept started out as one thing, but as development progressed – and as the team grew to understand the Wii MotionPlus limitations -- the team made compromises. But it never really works beyond a game that requires you to bat around a character using motion controlled batting motions that get misread far more often than should be acceptable.
Basically, you take indirect control over this ball character – male or female, your choice – to smash through a continuously scrolling screen filled with bricks of various shapes and sizes. To smash him, you simply swing the remote as if it was a bat. At the best case scenario the Wii MotionPlus senses the direction of the swing and sends the character flying in the opposite direction, skewed at the angle that you "hit" him. So the task is to knock into blocks and enemies using the angled precision of a Wii Remote swing.
Even when it works this game just never gels into anything more than boring arm-flailing busy work that goes on and on and on. There's "skill" involved by grabbing all the coins within a level, as well as trying to hit a combo system to get a score that can make the in-game leaderboards. But that's the thing: it doesn't work all that well. You'll have to put up with constant misreads that send your character flying at a completely different angle than how your swung the remote. You're constantly given feedback of where the Wii Remote is pointed with an on-screen remote displayed at the same angle, and when you're just holding or rotating the controller it's pretty close to 1:1. The problem comes from the game determining when the point of contact is -- since you're flicking the remote at an imaginary object on the screen, the game decides during your swinging when the remote "connects" with the character, and that's when the misreads happen.
Flingsmash tries to give that Nintendo polish with a storyline and game progression, but everything comes off as tacked on and unnecessary, right down to the boss battles who have some of the most predictable attack patterns. It also doesn't help that the game's over in a couple of short hours, with only the promise of additional mini-games that continue the tremendously dull "swing" mechanic. There's also a two-player co-op mode to keep things going, but again, it's tough to get excited about a game where you simply whallop a character using completely janky controls.
©2010-11-08, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
It really feels like the FlingSmash concept started out as one thing, but as development progressed – and as the team grew to understand the Wii MotionPlus limitations -- the team made compromises. But it never really works beyond a game that requires you to bat around a character using motion controlled batting motions that get misread far more often than should be acceptable.
Basically, you take indirect control over this ball character – male or female, your choice – to smash through a continuously scrolling screen filled with bricks of various shapes and sizes. To smash him, you simply swing the remote as if it was a bat. At the best case scenario the Wii MotionPlus senses the direction of the swing and sends the character flying in the opposite direction, skewed at the angle that you "hit" him. So the task is to knock into blocks and enemies using the angled precision of a Wii Remote swing.
Even when it works this game just never gels into anything more than boring arm-flailing busy work that goes on and on and on. There's "skill" involved by grabbing all the coins within a level, as well as trying to hit a combo system to get a score that can make the in-game leaderboards. But that's the thing: it doesn't work all that well. You'll have to put up with constant misreads that send your character flying at a completely different angle than how your swung the remote. You're constantly given feedback of where the Wii Remote is pointed with an on-screen remote displayed at the same angle, and when you're just holding or rotating the controller it's pretty close to 1:1. The problem comes from the game determining when the point of contact is -- since you're flicking the remote at an imaginary object on the screen, the game decides during your swinging when the remote "connects" with the character, and that's when the misreads happen.
Flingsmash tries to give that Nintendo polish with a storyline and game progression, but everything comes off as tacked on and unnecessary, right down to the boss battles who have some of the most predictable attack patterns. It also doesn't help that the game's over in a couple of short hours, with only the promise of additional mini-games that continue the tremendously dull "swing" mechanic. There's also a two-player co-op mode to keep things going, but again, it's tough to get excited about a game where you simply whallop a character using completely janky controls.
©2010-11-08, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved