Well after getting my copy of The Conduit a day early, I sat down and read the special edition hint and tips guide and once again HVS seems to be pimping their comitment to making an original game based mainly on modern pop culture things and that 's probably a very good way to describe the look of the game more like it borrows from many movies and games in the past and not really having an identity of it's own at the moment. They also seem very intent on talking about the Artwork of the game and while they sketches that are in both the booklet and unlockable in the game are very imaginitive the final game doesn't really match this with the exception of some weapon and enemy design, overall it's very poor as many others have said. The engine also seems mainly aimed at pushing the character models rather than the environments which often look a little bland and lacking detail, although on the levels people have said that they are very dull in level design, I had always thought that about the original Halo to be fair maybe not as much but still many FPS games suffer from this.
Anyway onto the way the game plays, control wise after getting used to it it can be very second nature and in many ways a very good substitue for a mouse keyboard combo, and with the ammount of customisation in the controls alone if you can't find a set up that suits you cance are you are either very fussy or not reallyusing it properly as I feel it is the best customisable control I have seen on a FPS on a console. Although it's a shame to say too bad they never put this level of customisation into other parts of the game as most of it feels very straight forward and by the numbers other than this.
Single player game wise it is not bad just not great, just really a case of playing through and getting used to the game more really, although there is some replay value if you really want to unlock everything and earn the achievements, which while very basic ones it's still nice to see developers on the Wii start to put them in there, does give something back to the replay value just hopefully future games from HVS they wont be as simple as just beating the game and collecting things and killing enemies.
Mulitplayer wise it is very strong, just very basic overall but I am sure it will be quite competitive for some time, just wished they had put more customisation into it that they did with the controls, but still I am hoping they improve all these problems with The Grinder, since even though it's not perfect in anyway it still shows that they are on the right track, although from the presentation of The Conduit I can't help thinking they were aiming for "Perfect Dark on the Wii" as for me the look and feel of the game kind of has bit of that about it.
