WiiWare offers you the chance to download exciting new games straight to Wii in minutes. These titles are created by both well-known publishers and also fresh, new talent who now have a platform to show the world their creativity! With the recent announcement of a new storage solution for Wii, the sky’s the limit when it comes to downloading new games to play and we’ve taken a close look at some of the stars on the horizon.
This week we’re shining the spotlight on some recent and upcoming games that have the strategy genre as their common ground, but offer three completely different experiences!
Swords & Soldiers is described as a ‘2D side-scrolling real time strategy game’ where you take control of a tribe and try to overcome your opponents and reach the other end of the battlefield. Dripping with humour and featuring crisp, cartoonish graphics, Fabian Akker from Ronimo Games describes some of the factions in Swords & Soldiers: “You’ve got the brutish Vikings and they’re very strong combatants and they have these axes…You’ve also got the Aztecs – they’re a little bit dark and evil, and they can also sacrifice their own units.” Ronimo Games created a special video introducing the third faction which you can now check out at the dedicated gamepage.
There are three different modes you can undertake: Campaign, Skirmish and Challenge. Campaign mode offers you ten different missions for each of the three factions. In Skirmish mode, you can go head-to-head against a friend or the CPU in a split-screen battle. The final Challenge mode offers a selection of specific tasks, such as Berserker Run, where you have to take a single unit as far as you can. So what makes this strategy game stand out amongst the rest? “It’s definitely different,” says Fabian, “because there’s a lot of action in there…it’s not only the strategic thing you have to do, but it’s also the timing of spells and timing of the right units – so that makes it a really fun and active game”.
In possibly the most unusual storyline ever in a tower defence strategy game, Robocalypse – Beaver Defense pits you against a mutated beaver, hellbent on revenge after his river is poisoned by a local robot-manufacturing company. Full of wisecracks from the writers behind the SpongeBob Squarepants™ series and featuring non-stop action, you have to hold your area by positioning mobile defences to stop the never-ending wave of attacks coming your way. But why beavers? Vogster Entertainment’s Alan Martin has the answer: “We wanted to have a humorous yet also an environmental theme to the game. It’s very funny, it’s very light…beavers are just funny naturally I think!”
The recently released Crystal Defenders R1 is a strategy game that features characters from one of the most famous franchises of them all – Final Fantasy. The game is simple to pick up – you need to defend your crystals from hordes of attackers by strategically positioning your fighters in the game environment. If you finish the level with even one of your original 20 crystals left, you get to move on to the next challenge.
The game is controlled using the Wii Remote in the horizontal position and Raul Nieto Garcia from Square Enix says Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is an important feature: “You can upload your scores, so that adds a lot of replayability to the game. It’s not only that you want to beat your own score, but you can try to be the best and compete with gamers all over the world.”
Click on the links above for further details on each game. Next week we’ll be looking at more upcoming WiiWare games, which use the unique Wii controls in novel ways.
