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IGN Review of Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked
I've been pulling for the Lost in Blue series since day one. Back on the Game Boy Color, one of my favorite niche titles was Survival Kids (9.0 out of 10 on our Game Boy site), a game that mixed the adventure elements of Zelda with the item combination and survival feeling of a non-horror version of something like Resident Evil. You played a boy who was washed up on shore after a ship went down, and had to figure out how to help him survive. It was an awesome pocket experience, and a game that was as entertaining and rare then as it is now. When Lost in Blue got a fresh start on DS, I was psyched, but over the years it's become apparent that the franchise has been pushed into the budget realm, as we're now seeing the game released on Wii, and it's again a mix of decent ideas, and sloppy, sloppy execution.
Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked starts out like every other title in the series. You play as a young boy, get a few minutes of story, and find yourself stuck on an island with nothing but your brains to help you through it. This time around it's Aidan Sanders, a young spoiled kid who happens to find himself on the outs with his pet monkey Hobo. After some introduction into the world, players are left to their own wanderings, and start piecing together their new life.
As with previous Lost in Blue games though, you'll meet up with a girl, and from then on have to balance two health, water, and hunger levels instead of just one, and go through test after test of AI "follow me" gameplay. Lucy Raine and her pet dog Max can be left back home in the cave, but that inevitably means even more backtrack, and it's really all about using things like boost-ups to get to new areas, so you'll need to go on babysitting duty once again.
The controls in Lost in Blue are actually not bad when dealing with the actual survival elements, but as far as main mobility goes you'll be scratching your head within minutes. The camera is completely static, and rather than actually control the character directly, the game is really having you move the camera, and animating a 3D model of the boy overtop. This is the same style of design that Fallout 3 has used a well (a common way of telling is that animations don't actually dictate player movement, so with some analog stick trickery you can actually slide across the screen left and right while "walking forward" as far as animations go). In addition, art has a bright, clean look, but it's far from polished, an some of the areas look extremely rough from a modeling, texture, and effects animation point of view. The skyboxes in the game, if you can call them that, are more single-colors or gradients than a true piece of art.
One of the bigger additions for this kick-off Wii version of Lost in Blue is the new pet system, but controlling Hobo isn't exactly very intuitive or fun. Rather than shaking a tree, for example, you can go first-person and point at the tree with IR. As you progress through the game Hobo will bring down more food than you'd be able to find with a simple shake, but the entire thing is extremely mechanical, as you send him out, watch him run (frozen in place), wait for him to come back, and only then get control of your character. The advantage of IR is that you can aim while still using the analog stick or hitting buttons; moving and commanding Hobo should be done at the same time, rather than one or the other.
As far as the other elements of Lost in Blue go, there's some interesting aspects of the game to be seen. You can cook, build furniture, pack yourself lunch boxes which you can eat any time throughout the day as cooked meals, and the game does a pretty nice job of making sure you're relatively close to fresh water steams (or other water sources) all the time, so it's a little less brutal in that way. All the building, cooking, and searching challenges are simple, usually made with IR and a slight amount of waggle included, but they're simple fun for a first effort on Wii. Of course you can play those games outside of the main mode too in two player mini-game multiplayer, but most gamers will get bored with it before finishing the 30+ challenges. A mission-based Gord and Fiona becomes available after a few hours of play, and while that's also a nice little addition for those that can get into Shipwrecked, the core controls and presentation are just way under par, and we'd be surprised if even the most die-hard bother with additional modes, much less finishing the game's single player offering at all. As always, decent ideas, but rough execution; that's the name of the game for Lost in Blue.
©2008-12-12, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked starts out like every other title in the series. You play as a young boy, get a few minutes of story, and find yourself stuck on an island with nothing but your brains to help you through it. This time around it's Aidan Sanders, a young spoiled kid who happens to find himself on the outs with his pet monkey Hobo. After some introduction into the world, players are left to their own wanderings, and start piecing together their new life.
As with previous Lost in Blue games though, you'll meet up with a girl, and from then on have to balance two health, water, and hunger levels instead of just one, and go through test after test of AI "follow me" gameplay. Lucy Raine and her pet dog Max can be left back home in the cave, but that inevitably means even more backtrack, and it's really all about using things like boost-ups to get to new areas, so you'll need to go on babysitting duty once again.
The controls in Lost in Blue are actually not bad when dealing with the actual survival elements, but as far as main mobility goes you'll be scratching your head within minutes. The camera is completely static, and rather than actually control the character directly, the game is really having you move the camera, and animating a 3D model of the boy overtop. This is the same style of design that Fallout 3 has used a well (a common way of telling is that animations don't actually dictate player movement, so with some analog stick trickery you can actually slide across the screen left and right while "walking forward" as far as animations go). In addition, art has a bright, clean look, but it's far from polished, an some of the areas look extremely rough from a modeling, texture, and effects animation point of view. The skyboxes in the game, if you can call them that, are more single-colors or gradients than a true piece of art.
One of the bigger additions for this kick-off Wii version of Lost in Blue is the new pet system, but controlling Hobo isn't exactly very intuitive or fun. Rather than shaking a tree, for example, you can go first-person and point at the tree with IR. As you progress through the game Hobo will bring down more food than you'd be able to find with a simple shake, but the entire thing is extremely mechanical, as you send him out, watch him run (frozen in place), wait for him to come back, and only then get control of your character. The advantage of IR is that you can aim while still using the analog stick or hitting buttons; moving and commanding Hobo should be done at the same time, rather than one or the other.
As far as the other elements of Lost in Blue go, there's some interesting aspects of the game to be seen. You can cook, build furniture, pack yourself lunch boxes which you can eat any time throughout the day as cooked meals, and the game does a pretty nice job of making sure you're relatively close to fresh water steams (or other water sources) all the time, so it's a little less brutal in that way. All the building, cooking, and searching challenges are simple, usually made with IR and a slight amount of waggle included, but they're simple fun for a first effort on Wii. Of course you can play those games outside of the main mode too in two player mini-game multiplayer, but most gamers will get bored with it before finishing the 30+ challenges. A mission-based Gord and Fiona becomes available after a few hours of play, and while that's also a nice little addition for those that can get into Shipwrecked, the core controls and presentation are just way under par, and we'd be surprised if even the most die-hard bother with additional modes, much less finishing the game's single player offering at all. As always, decent ideas, but rough execution; that's the name of the game for Lost in Blue.
©2008-12-12, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved