Vertigo

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 Official Site

Vertigo is a game that wants to be many things, but it falters at almost every turn. It follows in the footsteps left by popular games like those found in the Marble Blast series. Every stage features a set of obstacles along a variety of courses each populated with various pickups and power-ups. This is an inherently arcade-y and pick-up-and-play title. The gimmick behind this particular exercise in marble rolling excitement is the console that it calls home.

The Wii is often seen as a natural home for intuitive physics and motion-centric games much as the DS and iPhone are. After all, wouldn’t it be cool if rather than maneuvering a little ball around with your arrow keys, you could do it by waving and turning your hands? This is the real potential behind a game like vertigo. Sure, a developer can create a new compelling puzzle/marble game, but they will find themselves up against number of games that have vast amounts of polish on their side. To stand out from its illustrious competitors, Vertigo needs to mix good gameplay with fun, intuitive controls. Such a marriage would be nearly unstoppable in the world of rolling-ball puzzle games (which reminds me, where is the Wii Katamari game?).

When Vertigo is fired up up, it bares most of its secrets to you quickly. You can compete in a variety of timed races, challenges, and other contests. These all take place in various themed settings from futuristic cityscapes to floating stone pathways. None of these look very good unfortunately.  Although they keep things from getting too visually redundant, nevertheless, the Wii has been leveraged to make blocky, craggy, and (independent of its resolution and creative woes) ugly environments. You won’t be coming back to these levels to take in the sights that’s for sure.

Luckily, Vertigo has a light upgrade mechanic in place to lure you back to older playing grounds. As you progress through the game’s stages, you’ll earn bronze, silver, and gold ratings on the levels that you complete. The better you do, the more points you’ll get toward improving the stats of your ball. Traction, airtime control, speed, and more can all be upgraded, and this development angle is a welcome addition to the genre. Aside from adding some much needed depth to a pretty simple title, these upgrades save you somewhat from the utterly horrible control issues and the even worse control scheme that the game saddles you with.

In Vertigo, the remote is your sole controller. You control the speed and direction of your roll by pointing the tip of the controller in the direction that you want to go. This does not mean that you just point and the ball rolls in that direction. Instead, you hold the remote like a dart or javelin (always perpendicular to the screen and sensor bar) and tilt it up, down, left, and right. You can try doing this while holding it like a regular remote, but it’s inaccurate and awkward.

Unfortunately, holding it in the javelin position is almost as inaccurate and awkward, and after a long play session, it’s frankly rather painful. Maybe this game is stretching muscles I didn’t know I had, but it feels to me like the developers couldn’t settle on a good, comfortable way to control their game, instead settling on a physically unrealistic, conceptually “intuitive” approach to controlling your ball.

This kind of divorce between concept and execution is present throughout the game. The music is mostly soothing or exciting techno and gets boring before you’ve run off the course for the first time. Likewise, the drab settings and effects cease to interest or arrest one’s attention after you’ve seen each setting for the first time.

The idea of a Wii-centric, “futuristic” puzzle game like this makes a good deal of sense. Many other puzzle-like games have found a home on the Wii from de Blob to Zach and Wiki. As a longtime fan of many of these games (including the Marble Blast series), it pains me to see a good idea go to waste like this. There’s almost no way to recommend this game even if futuristic puzzle-ball games are your favorite games of all. There are many better options on systems and hardware that are readily available in households around the world. Go download one of them.

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