Wild 9

"Wild 9: Torture your players"

Why do I review so many games I don't like? Am I just a bitter gamer? No. It's just that the games I like, a lot of other people like too. And 1000-2000 words is a lot, more than I can say even about games like Chrono Trigger or Kingdom Hearts. So when the urge hits to review a game, it's usually so lame only a few other people have given it their attention.

Like Wild 9: Torture Your Enemies, brought to us by the same folks who gave us the excellent Earthworm Jim. The manual and website made it out like this was going to be an ongoing series with changes in loyalty and wins and losses on both sides. But it never moved beyond the debut, and for good reason.

YOu're Wex Major, a teenager in the future in some farflung corner of the galaxy who is the only one capable of using the Rig, a machine that shoots out a tractor beam. And as the title says he can torture his enemies with it. He can smash them into walls until they fall apart, he can drop them onto spikes to give himself a handy stepping stone, he can drop them into the grinders of a threshing machine. He can even swing on electronic pulleys to reach higher areas. Which would be great if it wasn't so awkward to use. I honestly don't see why Karn wants the thing.

If you need to pick up a bad guy with the rig and take him somewhere else to use his crunchy metal body to fill a spike pit or something, it's really easy to overdo it and bash him against the ground a couple times. And if you bash a guy against the ground a couple times, he dies and you have to go all the way back to get a new dead meat robot enemy to try again. Try getting Nitro up all those floors without losing him like ten times. I suppose some will say I should practice more and then it'll become easy, but why should I practice a game that isn't fun in the first place?

The game is the same drab levels over and over. You basically have two types of levels: boring-to-look-at platformer and hover bike dogfight, repeated ad nauseum. Despite being from the EWJ team, nothing about this game is special to look at. It's a bunch of hazy and ugly polygons trying to look like people and aliens. I'm not sure what those things I'm supposed to avoid running into in the first hoverbike fight are supposed to be. And honestly, I don't care. The sound isn't much better, with boring BGM and stupid dubbed-in catchphrases (Wexcellent! Oh yeah, you guys are SOOOO clever for coming up with something like that). I find it impossible to believe that the EWJ games on inferior consoles are superior to this bomb, and yet they are in every way.

Wild 9 is not a good game, a wild ride, an excellent series that was cut down before it had a chance. It was one of the series that was cut short before it could spawn and that's how it should have been. There is not a single thing that worked for this game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/08/04