Heatseeker review (Wii)

Variety is the spice of life, or so they say, in which case the life of a Wii owner must be pretty bland tasting. There’s plenty of meat and two veg in the form of party games, first person shooters and racing games and that’s all well and good, but too much of the same thing gets boring. A gamer cannot live on the bare essentials, he needs something with a bit more zing than the gaming staples.. Luckily Codemasters has come along with a big bowl of steaming chilli for Wii owners with Heatseeker.

Going Downtown?

In Heatseeker you play the part of a pilot in a group of international peacekeepers, call sign ‘Downtown’. There’s not much of a story to talk about, just a series of missions where you and your fellow peacekeepers have to stamp out threats to world peace. During the game you’ll be flying all over the world to maintain order, the bad guys do like to set up shop in varied locations, you’ll be flying over tropical islands, not so dormant volcanoes, glaciers and many other locations in your battle against evil.

The opposition include terrorists, dictators, smugglers, even one of your own who’s gone rogue, these missions are quite varied and you’ll find a nice mix of objectives throughout, it’s not just shoot down the bad guys. Each mission is comprised of a series of objectives, take down fighters, knock out radar jammers, knock out ground support, defend your forces, that sort of thing, but you don’t always have to complete one before another starts. For example you may be taking down enemy fighters and be asked to move on to ground support before all the fighters have been downed. This adds a bit of unpredictability to the game, as well as realism, , it’s a nice touch but it doesn’t always work in your favour, sometimes finishing the first objective completely can distract you from a potentially more urgent objective.

On a Wing and a prayer

The odds are definitely not stacked in your favour, but it’s not as if you’re up there in some rickety old bi-plane or something, you have some serious hi tech hardware at your disposal. The game features a combination of the latest real world military jets and experimental prototypes, fighters and bombers will be used in your missions. These are bristling with technology, computer systems will pick and highlight your targets for you, always pointing you in the right direction, even when they’re not in direct view.

You can of course pick your own targets, as the computer systems, no matter how efficient at tracking them, doesn’t always pick the most urgent threat that needs taking care of. And when it comes to taking care of things you’ve been given some seriously big guns for the job, all planes are equipped with a standard cannon and a there’s a whole range of guided missiles, torpedoes and bombs to fit out your planes with. Air to air, air to ground, heetseekers, radar guided, smart bombs, ship sinkers, there’s something for every eventuality, and you’ll end up using them all in your fight to keep world peace. You’re not always alone in the skies either, a lot of missions will see you accompanied by wing men, who you can either let pick their own targets, or assign targets for them, but it’s quite tricky to give them their orders.

Flying by hand

Controls with the Wiimote are, for the most part, very intuitive and work well, you get two control schemes arcade and professional. In arcade mode flight controls are handled using the Wiimote to steer and the nunchuk's analogue stick as throttle, but in professional mode the motion sensing of both parts of the controller are used. This takes quite a lot of getting used to, and while it is closer to real flight controls it’s not going to be the control scheme of choice for most people.

Most of the other controls are pretty straightforward, your triggers fire your cannon and missiles, ‘A’ button selects target, and your 1 and 2 buttons bring up your map, but the D pad is where control issues arise. Too many functions have been crammed on to the D pad for them to be used effectively, down changes your weapon, left issues orders to your wingman, and combinations of up, down and left give you all sorts of camera functions, zoom, look backwards, target cam. It’s all a bit fiddly, even without the small size of the Wiimote's D pad, and you’ll probably not bother using the camera functions. And because of the small size of the D pad it is almost impossible to issue command to your wingman without changing weapons, considering the nunchuk's ‘C’ button is completely unused it would have been a much wiser mode to assign one of these functions to it.

Seat of the pants stuff

But, despite these control issues the everything works pretty well together, controls make for a more immersive experience. The action never lets up and has a good learning curve, although some of the later defensive missions can be a bit too tough, but they never feel impossible. Graphics and sound complement the gameplay well, plane models are excellent and you get a real feeling of speed when you‘re tearing round the skies, but some of the scenery doesn’t look as good as it could.

When making a missile hit you also get this nice touch called ‘Impact Cam’ which stops the action and gives you a close up view of your missile taking down a plane. It’s very much like the slow motion crashes you get in the Burnout games, it doesn’t really add anything to the gameplay, but adds a bit of drama to the atmosphere of the game. Sound also adds to the atmosphere well, you get some realistic engine, weapons and explosion effects, radio chatter is good and well acted, and you get some good music that really suit’s the gameplay and helps build the tension in some of the games more urgent missions.

Top Gun

All in all you get a pretty complete package here that does everything well, it’s not perfect, the controls could have been a little better, a multiplayer mode would have been nice, graphics could do with a little work, but what it does it does well.

If your in to your air combat games then this is definitely one to pick up, or if you like a flight simulator with some action then it’s got to be worth trying out the professional controls. Like I said, it’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of fun to be had here and it’s something a bit different from the usual Wii titles.