The Conduit was about a conspiracy between aliens and the founders of the American state, discovered inadvertently by a Secret Service agent who had presumed to be fighting off a terrorist group. Surprisingly, the aliens were developed and reproduced on earth by John Adams and then sent out to conquer human civilization through conduits that enable transport between far-flung locations. Conduit 2 is about more of this kind of thing, deepening the conspiracy by adding Progenitors, ancient beings that once controlled human kind and whose strength needs to now be absorbed into a mechanical orb in order to stop John Adams once and for all. This is more pretext than I would have needed to shoot at men in radiation suits and bipedal insect people.
Conduit 2 is the continuation of a series intended to prove the shooter—the most widely celebrated genre of this era of gaming—had a place on Nintendo’s mommy blogger machine. Such hardware partisanship might seem unfamiliar to those without any tribal interest in motherboards and heat sinks. You wouldn’t, for instance, hear people saying a nook was less well-suited to displaying Russian historical fiction because it’s got a full color display. Yet these distinctions are taken seriously in video games, born from a superstition that the device held in hand is more important than the emotions the game you’re experiencing through it intends to evoke.
So then The Conduit arrived in 2009 as irrefutable proof that shooting bipedal insect people can be as meaningful on Wii as on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. The point was taken and a question was asked: who cares about shooting bipedal insect people? While it’s true that many Wii owners were beginning to hope for more interesting uses of their time than cow racing and bowling, it was never clear that shooting at aliens was what those people had been hoping for.
Conduit 2 is built around four big mission environments: an oceanic oil rig, Washington D.C., a Chinese mountain palace, and a Siberian compound. There are also brief pit stops to a South American ruins and the submerged city of Atlantis, which is the game’s hub world. The settings are indeed more varied than the original, and each one is a long, winding journey through natural corridors, and medium-sized arenas where you can test the tactical nuances of the game’s weaponry. Each of the missions begin to feel exhausting after a few minutes. For all the variety of moving from craggy mountains to moonlit tundra, they are almost entirely one-way affairs.
The most open-ended scenario happens in the Chinese level where you enter a palace chamber with 4 passages leading away from the central room while the door forward is locked. To pass it you’ll have to digress into each of the 4 side passages, kill the pockets of enemies at the end, then drain the elemental spirit from an old statue (via a single button press). Repeat this process four times and you’ll have earned your way back onto the straight and narrow.
Likewise, the game has no particular insight into its shooting mechanics. Even the brick-headed BulletStorm offered a secondary scoring and lasso systems to enliven its shooting. The genres best games have gone far beyond this: Half-Life 2 broke up its corridor shooting with extended stretches of isolation and environmental puzzle solving. Metroid Prime made reading the environment more important than moment-to-moment combat. Even BioShock gave players some moral gristle to chew on, nudging players into an inner conversation about who it was they were shooting.
None of these meaningful variations on the reductive act of aiming and clicking a button are impossible on Wii, and in the case of Metroid Prime, the looking glass tether is quite improved by the Wii remote. The thought that occurs to me playing Conduit 2 is not one of amazement that the console can run a first person shooter but instead a gnawing disappointment that there is nothing to do besides aim and shoot. If there is any vigor left in the debate over whether or not a device capable of direct aim is less preferable to dual analog input, Conduit 2 offers little to update it. The challenges of the bounding box, the constant visual disruption of seeing Agent Ford’s forearm gesticulating this way and that remain as awkward as ever.
Mysteriously, Conduit 2 is, to my taste, far less playable using the dual analog method. The rubbery discombobulation of the pointer aiming and its unreliable lock-on are far easier to manage than the great irritation of constraint that falls across every action with the Classic Controller. There are many challenges left to answer in the quest to use motion controls for more than bowling, but simply going back to last generation’s control solution feels like the worst of all possible solutions.
It’s fitting in some ways that what following the game does have seems to be more concerned with its multiplayer modes, where questions of emotional purpose and the invocation of ideas are easy to forget about. Ironically, it’s in its multiplayer mode that Conduit 2 is most ambitious and interesting. There are more than a dozen game types to play through, including a basketball variant where the objective is to steal a mechanical orb and drop it into a basket in your opponents area before being killed. In another mode, called “Bounty Hunter,” every player is assigned another player as their personal target, which creates an interesting personal subtext to the broader scrum.
Ideas like that, simple but able to conjure some drama and personal emotion from the insectoid husks, are infrequent and never built upon. What is reconfirmed with Conduit 2 is the Wii can indeed process first person shooting games about historical figures engineering alien races in the bowels of the capital. I don’t think anyone needed that possibility proved per se, but we now have our proof. And the question about what motion controls can do after cow racing and bowling remains open.
Conduit 2 was developed by High Voltage Software and published by Sega. It is available for the Nintendo Wii.
Michael Thomsen has written about videogames, sex, and animals for ABC World News, Nerve, n+1, IGN, The Faster Times, The Millions, Gamasutra, The Escapist, and Edge. He lives in New York City.