Wing Island draws on the shared childhood experience of pretending to fly little plastic airplanes or paper affairs about the house with dramatic sound effects. At its core it's a perfect idea: who couldn't enjoy a game that lets you motion-sensingly fly a plane around a giant virtual world?
A giant virtual world, however, Wing Island is not—Wing Island takes place exactly where you might expect: on a couple of islands that just happen to be woefully sparse in their architecture. As a child, the world was your oyster: the TV cabinet, under the chairs, take-offs and landings on the housecats, around the trees outside and all manner of places in between. In Wing Island there are some rocks.
And that's a shame because literally the only thing the game has going for it is the control style: if the game were on any other system it would be virtually devoid of any compelling entertainment value. As it stands, the method of interacting with the plane is pure fun—twisting and pitching your aircraft through the skies using nothing but the Wii Remote is almost viscerally entertaining and enjoyable. It's a blast either with your single plane, or in game modes where you control a formation of five, and feels tighter and more responsive with immediate feedback than nearly any other Wii game we've seen so far. The problem is simply that there's nothing that enjoyable to do while you're flying.
The shortcomings of the game stem from those two primary problems: the area you have to interact with is simply too devoid of anything fun to fly around, and the tasks they charge you with conducting in this space do not employ the environment in any meaningful way. There's no takeoff, no landing. You can't get out of your plane, you can hardly perform any exciting plane-related maneuvers. Even when the game totally falls flat and you realize you're still having fun just flying around aimlessly, it makes you wonder what could have been if Hudson would have simply tried to imagine what sorts of things would be enjoyable for the player to do.
Instead of offering pleasing plane-related diversions, Hudson appears to have attempted to rectify that enjoyment shortcoming and add substance to the simple concept of motion-sensing air travel by basing the game's structure off a series of various missions. You'll pick one and try to carry it out "perfectly" in an effort to get money to upgrade your planes. The curious thing about the missions is that they're so poorly thought out that it actually is less fun to do them than to literally fly around doing nothing. One task has you spinning back and forth over very small and centralized plots of land to drop flame retardant and prevent the forests from burning. Another charges you with dropping bombs on a triangular rock cluster near the outset of the island. You're flying an airplane, capable of reaching limitless distances and soaring to the heavens, weaving in and out of spectacularly little spaces and around majestic landscapes—but no, you'll be flying back and forth over tiny patches of land this time.
Other missions fare a little better: one has you explore the entire island section in search of three rare trees, while another has you locate flocks of birds to photograph. These missions work better than the majority because they operate on the fundamental enjoyment of flying in this game: leisurely coasting around the world you have to explore. Sadly they're too infrequent, too short, and too shallow to provide any long-lasting enjoyment (though the picture-taking missions elicit quaint fantasies of an aerial Wii-controlled Pokémon Snap).
One far-too-telling game variation exists in the form of "free mode," where you can pick an island and a plane and just fly, "without having to worry about missions," as the manual puts it. If even Hudson realizes it's more fun to just zip around than it is to play their missions, why couldn't they have come up with better ways to interact with the landscape in the first place?
When it comes down to it, Wing Island is a glimpse into the solid gaming potential that exists for flight-based games with Nintendo's Wii controller. But when we realize that we're not zooming through grandiose landscapes and performing crazy tricks without a care in the world, it becomes disappointingly apparent that all Wing Island's really got to offer is an example of a neat idea—and a reminder that we're seriously hurting for Pilotwings.
A giant virtual world, however, Wing Island is not—Wing Island takes place exactly where you might expect: on a couple of islands that just happen to be woefully sparse in their architecture. As a child, the world was your oyster: the TV cabinet, under the chairs, take-offs and landings on the housecats, around the trees outside and all manner of places in between. In Wing Island there are some rocks.
And that's a shame because literally the only thing the game has going for it is the control style: if the game were on any other system it would be virtually devoid of any compelling entertainment value. As it stands, the method of interacting with the plane is pure fun—twisting and pitching your aircraft through the skies using nothing but the Wii Remote is almost viscerally entertaining and enjoyable. It's a blast either with your single plane, or in game modes where you control a formation of five, and feels tighter and more responsive with immediate feedback than nearly any other Wii game we've seen so far. The problem is simply that there's nothing that enjoyable to do while you're flying.
The shortcomings of the game stem from those two primary problems: the area you have to interact with is simply too devoid of anything fun to fly around, and the tasks they charge you with conducting in this space do not employ the environment in any meaningful way. There's no takeoff, no landing. You can't get out of your plane, you can hardly perform any exciting plane-related maneuvers. Even when the game totally falls flat and you realize you're still having fun just flying around aimlessly, it makes you wonder what could have been if Hudson would have simply tried to imagine what sorts of things would be enjoyable for the player to do.
Instead of offering pleasing plane-related diversions, Hudson appears to have attempted to rectify that enjoyment shortcoming and add substance to the simple concept of motion-sensing air travel by basing the game's structure off a series of various missions. You'll pick one and try to carry it out "perfectly" in an effort to get money to upgrade your planes. The curious thing about the missions is that they're so poorly thought out that it actually is less fun to do them than to literally fly around doing nothing. One task has you spinning back and forth over very small and centralized plots of land to drop flame retardant and prevent the forests from burning. Another charges you with dropping bombs on a triangular rock cluster near the outset of the island. You're flying an airplane, capable of reaching limitless distances and soaring to the heavens, weaving in and out of spectacularly little spaces and around majestic landscapes—but no, you'll be flying back and forth over tiny patches of land this time.
Other missions fare a little better: one has you explore the entire island section in search of three rare trees, while another has you locate flocks of birds to photograph. These missions work better than the majority because they operate on the fundamental enjoyment of flying in this game: leisurely coasting around the world you have to explore. Sadly they're too infrequent, too short, and too shallow to provide any long-lasting enjoyment (though the picture-taking missions elicit quaint fantasies of an aerial Wii-controlled Pokémon Snap).
One far-too-telling game variation exists in the form of "free mode," where you can pick an island and a plane and just fly, "without having to worry about missions," as the manual puts it. If even Hudson realizes it's more fun to just zip around than it is to play their missions, why couldn't they have come up with better ways to interact with the landscape in the first place?
When it comes down to it, Wing Island is a glimpse into the solid gaming potential that exists for flight-based games with Nintendo's Wii controller. But when we realize that we're not zooming through grandiose landscapes and performing crazy tricks without a care in the world, it becomes disappointingly apparent that all Wing Island's really got to offer is an example of a neat idea—and a reminder that we're seriously hurting for Pilotwings.