Water Warfare Review (WiiWare)

Most first person shooters are geared toward an older audience that has no problem seeing limbs blown off and blood all over the environment. Hudson is trying to increase the size of the shooter audience by creating an FPS geared toward children. Water Warfare is a typical first person perspective game where instead of lead flying all over the place, players engage in a giant water gun fight.

Water gun fights are not an experience many, if any, have had on a console. It was thought that the FPS genre was only for the older players. Water Warfare opens up by allowing you to create your on screen representation rather than having a stock character typical to the genre. You have about nine different options for faces, hair, and clothing to choose from giving you a large variety of options to use in creating your virtual hero. The single player campaign is broken up into about 40 missions spread over 8 maps, most of them taking just a few minutes to complete and all based around a single objective. You are tasked with eliminating a pre-determined number of combatants during a set amount of time or defending an objective, such as a playground slide, from oncoming “invaders”. The eight maps are map up of small and large versions of the four locales in the game. You will be fighting on a beach, the playground, a city plaza and a small mountain arena.

The controls in water warfare are very responsive. Aiming is done with the Wii Remote’s pointer, fire your water guns with the B button and you can jump with the A button. The object is to soak your opponents before they soak you. Each player has a T-shirt that represents their health. If the shirt fills with water you are knocked out of the fight and must respawn. If you run out of water you can refill your gun at water fountains or in the ocean. You must be careful though because you can take damage by standing in water. There are no melee combats but there are a number of objects around the environment that can be used to help you in your quest to dominate the water soaked battlefields. Raincoats allow you take water damage for a short period of time. Towels reduce the amount of water you’ve been hit with allowing you to get back into the fight again. You also have things like water bombs that act much like you would expect a grenade to work in a traditional FPS. There is also the ability to dual wield water pistols to increase your rate of fire. All together there are about 6 different weapons that you can wield from a standard water pistol or water machine gun to a water shotgun or bazooka that fires blasts of water at your opponents. For players who don’t like the Wii Remote and Nunchuk you can hook up a Classic Controller and use the dual analog stick control method typical of other console shooters. You can also use the Wii Zapper if you find that controller to your liking.

Also included are a number of multi-player modes. Split Screen multi player is supported as well as online matches for up to eight players, though only one player is allowed per console in online matches. You connect through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and a clock counts down while opponents are located. You can battle in the standard death match and capture the flag modes and well as team death match and capture the flag. The online experience does not lag and the match making is usually very quick to find opponents. You can, as you would expect log on and play against friends using Nintendo’s Friend Code System. If you’re having trouble finding people to play with or you just want to practice before heading out into the real world all the online maps are available to play with bots so you can hone your skills.

Visually the game lacks behind experiences typical of today’s standard. The game appears similar to a later version of a Nintendo 64 game or a very early game cube game. There are not a lot of textures and the characters, while there are a lot of variants have the slightly blockly look you expect of games made in generations past. This does not detract too much from the overall experience as there are a lot of details in the environments and you can interact with many of the objects such as rocking horses on the playground map.

This game is a solid experience, especially for younger players who can’t play the more gorey, blood fests found today. There is no violence to be seen unless you consider sniping children with water guns to be violent. It has the same laughable, fun experience you would expect if you were actually on a playground shooting your friends with water guns. If you’re looking for a light hearted experience or you really like water guns you should check out Water Warfare.

Final Score: 3/5