Wild 9

"I was promised a final boss with a face the size of New York, dammit!"

Wild 9 carries the message, “Torture your enemies” on the cover of the jewel case. For the most part, this option for disposal of your foes, is the only truly amusing part of the game. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not an option without going far out of your way. Most of the time, killing the bad guys is done by just slamming them back and forth on the ground until they crumble. Is this torture? Not really. But then, neither is stuffing someone in a grinder, burning them to death, or dropping them into a pit of spikes. Those things are certainly horrible, but fall more under the category of mutilation and violent death than torture. I bring this up to illustrate the main theme of this review: namely, that the game promises certain things that seem like a fun idea, but it fails at carrying them out well.

Story and Characters

This is the main area where the reality doesn’t quite meet the promise or the potential. To be honest, much of the disjoint comes from the game manual and the packaging material. So either whoever wrote that stuff took an extremely liberal license with the game, or the designers were unable to include much of the stuff they had planned for whatever reason (deadlines, staffing issues, pressure from the publisher over deadlines, budget, deadlines), and then forgot to take it out of the print materials once the game was finalized. So what kind of stuff am I talking about?

Well, let’s look at the Wild 9 themselves. They are put forward as a kind of intergalactic super-hero misfit group. Fine, so they’re heroes, and they each have wacky abilities and personality quirks, according to their write-ups. They were also all captured (with the exception of your character), and it’s up to you to free them, making use of their abilities along the way. So let’s see what each of them can do, and what the game does with them:

Volstagg: A big strong guy. When you save him, he helps you push a big ship out of the way. That’s it. Whoop dee doo.

Nitro: Okay, this one actually works, but it’s the exception. He’s allergic to everything, and his response is to explode. Violently. Repeatedly. You actually are in his company for a long stretch of his level, and have to move him around and let him blow up around enemies and security doors and such. This one was done right, at least.

Pokkit: reportedly can pull anything out of his interdimensional pockets, but it’s usually something goofy. Umm, I think you run into this guy, but if it’s the one i’m thinking of, he gets you a machine gun. Goofy? No. Clear that it’s him? No. Fun? Not really, since it takes away the fun of your main weapon.

MacSheen: He has a mechanical body that can transform into virtually any kind of machinery (now here’s the guy who should turn into a machine gun). When you find him, he turns into one thing once, and it’s... a lever? A stupid stick to pull. What the heck?

Henry, the aquatic biped: He does his job correctly, at least. That makes 2 out of 5, so far. You ride him through a swamp.

Crystal: For one thing, she has a crystalline, solar-powered body. In the lever you find her in, you have to constantly keep her in bright light so she can make her way to the exit. A power here is in fact an obstacle, but it makes the level mildly interesting. In her write-up, however, she’s supposed to having living, expressive hair. Again, this fails to make any appearance in the actual game.

Boomer: Supposedly, she throws her magic tartan and gains superhuman strength. Well, she doesn’t.

Rounding out the 9 are the playable character, who is supposed to be some kind of prophetic hero, and another guy who doesn’t even show up in the game. Apparently he’s off piloting your old ship. Great help. So we’re down to Wild 8. Really, though, it’s at best Wild 1, lame 5, and mostly OK 2.

Some other glaring deficiencies in the game stand out. For one, the back of the box says that the final boss is so big, his face is the size of new york. Umm, no. When you finally reach him, he’s probably less than 30 feet tall. Yet another disappointment. What might be the worst of all, however, is the myseterious green men. See, there are these little creatures made out of green goo that show up on just about every level, and play a large role in the loading screen images before each level, where aspects of the level are displayed. They’re made out to be a mystery: What are they? Where are they coming from? What is their function (other than to annoy the hell out of you)? Well, you make it all the way to the end of the game and... nothing. The mystery remains, but it’s more along the lines of, what were those things ever doing in the game in the first place? All in all, we get a big anti-climax. To think of all those wasted hours reading the interminably long back-story in the manual.

Maybe I’m being too hard on the game, referring to things that are mostly only in the manual. But they just show how much better the game could have been, and that someone did have more imagination at one point. Many of them are indeed carried through to the game anyway, like the fact that there are only 8 (I guess Wild 8 doesn’t sound as good) people in the team, and the whole green man thing.

Gameplay

This is the game’s one saving grace. Wild 9 does, at least, feature pretty unique gameplay. The main weapon and feature of the game is The Rig. This is a device equipped permanently to Wex, the guy you control. It’s essentially a grappling energy beam. You shoot it, and a wavy energy line grabs onto the enemy (or other stuff, but I’ll get to that). You can then carry him around, slam him into the ground or other stuff repeatedly, or, best of all, throw him into some kind of mangling machinery, a flame spout, a ceiling fan, etc., and then laugh as he screams horribly (they’re all robots, best as I can tell, so it’s not inhumane. Well, maybe a little). Your rig can power-up a bit, giving you longer reach and stronger slams. This is how you’ll dispatch most enemies, and you have to use them creatively to get past certain obstacles (like dropping them into a pit of spikes and then using them as stepping stones to get across). You also use the rig to pick up certain objects and move them around, ones that would be too heavy for you otherwise. And finally, you can use the rig to grab onto ‘swing point’, turning your beam into a swing line as you fly wildly back and forth to reach new areas. The Rig’s beam is pretty chaotic at the best of times. There are some places where you have to carry enemies long distances, and no matter how careful you are, you often end up slamming them into the ground inadvertently, killing them before you reach your intended destination, making you backtrack to pick up another one. I guess this is just a skill thing that you’re supposed to develop. You can also supplement the rig with missiles or grenades, just for variety.

You use this mostly on platform-type levels that are done in a 2 1/2-D style. Basically, you can only move left and right, but in places the path branches and jut out in the third dimension. So, you could jump up to a higher platform, and that one swings out at a 90 degree angle to the lower path . You can still only move left and right along each, though. This was done in some early Playstation games, like Pandemonium and Klonoa.

Other than the platform levels that work as described just above, there are a few alternate gameplay style levels. On a few levels, you race a jetbike through fields of hazards, hunting down a bad guy, and on two others you’re in a freefall down a long tunnel, with stuff to avoid crashing into, and with enemies that you have to try and make crash into that same stuff. These add a little variety, and are welcome.

So despite the game’s other failings, you can at least say that it’s unique.

Graphics

To be honest, I’m not a great evaluator in this area. I don’t really know much about pixels, jaggies, anti-aliasing, or stuff like that. That said, this game does look a little rough, by which I mean grainy. Not only that, but the visual design is a little off. As far as I can tell, it’s supposed to have a comic book/cartoon-ish feel to it. As it is, most of the characters look kind of dorky. This is especially so with the main character, and his floppy black bunch of hair. Fortunately, he’s usually seen at a reasonable distance, and making out details is hard. Wait, is that a good thing? Well, when you see him up close, you kind of wish you hadn’t. He’s a really skinny dude with Elvis hair, and when you let him stand still, he does some weird bopping stuff, like to music, among other strange moves. In motion, he’s equally bizarre, always doing a kind of slow-motion running thing. Other character designs are similar, with a kind of squat, roundish look to them. There are, at least, a broad variety of environments, and each has new enemies in them, so you don’t get too bored.

Sound

Umm, there’s a lot of it? Seriously, the soundtrack is okay, if you don’t mind heavy metal/industrial music. Sound effects though, well, they’re well done, but again, kind of dorky. When you set an enemy on fire, for example, he runs back and forth, screaming, “Aaahh! Aaahh! Aaaahh!”. That part is alright. And the rig sounds kind of cool when it’s firing, like sandpaper rubbed on an aluminum sheet. But other stuff, like Wex shouting “Wexcellent!”, and the little green men with their helium-inspired voices, get kind of annoying. Definitely uncool, to say the least. It is fitting, though, with the rock-ish, cartoon-ish feel of the game as a whole.

Challenge & Replayability

Getting used to the more complicated Rig maneuvers can be tricky, and there are a couple points where you might get a little stuck. For example, a flaming car that I just could not jump over no matter how many times I tried, until I figured out what to do when I picked the game back up a couple of years later. It’s not just a fly-through game, so if you’re interested enough to stick with it, there a bit of challenge. It does seem rather short once all is said and done, however. This just adds to my theory that the developers were rushed to put out what could have been a much better product.

There are 2 difficulty levels: easy and hard. The only difference that I could detect was that you take more damage on hard level. Other than that, don’t hold your breath for any bonuses or secrets. I actually played it again after beating it, this time on hard level, hoping beyond hope that there would be something extra, some additional reward, maybe a ‘real’ ending... Sigh. Some things are just not meant to be. If you’re of the particularly determined variety, you might want to re-play the game in a quest to locate all 99 gears on each level. They are found throughout every platform level, some in out-of-the-way or hard-to-reach places. Getting them all, or getting a %100 torture rating on each level, earns you a free continue. This continue lets you restart the level you’re on once all of your lives run out. But this isn’t really any help at all, since you can just re-load the game you saved at the end of the last level, and start in the exact same position, possibly with more lives in your inventory. So this is no reason in itself to pursue the goal of finding every gear. Other than personal satisfaction, or possibly a retrospective look at how sad your life has become, there’s no point in doing so.

Fun factor

Okay, I’ve said a lot of negative things, and complained how “torturing” enemies isn’t really torturing them, just killing them in horrible ways. In truth, I have to admit that it is kind of fun mutililating the bad guys. Whipping around on a swing point is pretty fun too. So can the game be fun for action/platform fans? Absolutely. But the game is still below average in fun, compared to the general inventory of games out there. If you need a number, I’ll say it’s 5/10 fun.

Conclusion

Again, I’ve said a lot of bad things about the game. That doesn’t mean that it’s to be avoided at all costs. As stated, the gameplay is pretty unique. And if it must be known, I enjoyed the game enough to be willing to write a walkthrough for it. But will I ever play it again in entirety? Likely not. As I began this review by stating, the reality of the game never quite lives up to the promise. Check it out if it’s cheap to do so, but don’t expect too much.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/04