Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

November 16,2007 - Original third party games haven't been that successful on the Wii so far, with Nintendo's games and ports making up most of the successful games on it. Capcom looks to remedy that with Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, a new game that attempts to merge point-and-click adventure and puzzle games together in a package that shows that third party companies can make great original games for the Wii. Do Zack & Wiki find the hidden treasure or do they come away empty-handed?

The story of Zack & Wiki surprisingly enough stars Zack, a young pirate that joins the Sea Rabbit pirate crew, and Wiki, a golden monkey that Zack can use as his tool to turn living creatures into tools that he can use. They're flying in their airship one day when the goons of their rival pirate crew, Rose Rock, attack the ship and they're forced to abandon the treasure onboard for the sake of their lives. They find a treasure near the crash site, which they decide to open, and what they find inside is the golden skull of the legendary pirate Barbaros. He tells them of a terrible curse that has spread his golden body parts across the land, locked away in 15 other treasure chests and gets them to help put him back together again. As a reward, he'll take Zack & Wiki to find his legendary treasure stash for helping him out. Along your journey, you'll come across a great variety of environments, from jungles to volcanoes, frozen temples, and more places to visit, which offers not only a great deal of visual variety, but helps give each level it's own unique charms and challenges.

While Zack & Wiki may come off as strictly a point-and-click adventure game for the Wii, it's more of a puzzle game in the vein of Exit for the PSP. Sure, the game's all about clicking and pointing Zack around levels, but you're solving puzzles in order to progress through the level and find the treasure at the end goal. You'll come across multiple puzzles while moving through levels and, depending on how efficiently you solve them, you're rated in HirameQ, a fancy form of IQ points, that are tallied up at the end of the level to show you how well you did. There are some puzzles you can get past without figuring out the perfect solution, but for the most part, if you have no idea what to do, you'll be stuck there for awhile to figure it out. Luckily, time doesn't matter unless it's part of the puzzle itself, so you can usually take your time and think things through without being rushed. If you happen to need a hint, you can press the 1 button and call out Granny, the wise, old member of the crew, and use an Oracle Doll to get her to help you out. It's not a perfectly reliable solution, but if you're stumped and don't wish to use other means to figure it out, it's a nice way to see if you're just missing something obvious that makes the level much easier to figure out. If you make a mistake and die, which isn't too hard to do at all, you'll either need to use a Platinum Ticket to return to the level just before you died, or start over again. Keep in mind that the Platinum Ticket and Oracle Doll will lower your total score at the end of the level, so OCD gamers will likely start over again and repeat the process and make the right choice this time. It's a good way to offer help, but at the cost of your final score when you mess up.

Moving onto the actual puzzle in Zack & Wiki, they involve a mix of motions, clicking, and strategy. The motion-based puzzles range from pulling levers at the right time, placing puzzle pieces, swinging objects, and many, many more. It's one of the most impressive Wii games around, in terms of variety in uses of the Wii Remote's motion controls. The majority of your motion controls involves shaking the Wii Remote to morph Wiki into a bell that can turn enemies into various useful items or fend off the ghost that's guarding the treasure in each level. Other puzzles involve simple point-and-clicking to activate items on the level, pick up objects and move them around, or just navigate levels in an efficient manner. The strategy involved requires you to piece these actions together in the correct order, since you're really going to need to figure out the easiest order of doing things in each level or you risk running into a dead end or dieing. Each level is rated from one to ten stars for how tough that level is, and it definitely does not lie. Even the levels that are four to five stars can be a challenge if you're not seeing everything clearly, though the killer levels are the nine and ten star levels and throw so much at you at once that it's almost overwhelming at first before you piece together the solution. The boss battles are truly the most interesting parts of the game, as they require you to use your skills from the previous levels all at once along with adding a boss that ups the challenge even more. It'll definitely take all of your cunning to beat this game, despite any impressions the graphics may give you as to what type of audience the game caters to. Luckily, you're able to have friends help you out a little bit, mostly in the form of extra cursors so they can point out things instead of smudging up your TV with their greasy fingers.

When you beat levels, you return to your headquarters, which is where you can interact with the rest of your crew. It is here where you can get some rumors on gameplay hints, buy Oracle Dolls and Platinum Tickets, check out your stats, and do a lot of other stuff. Adding the stuff OCD gamers have to fear when playing the game, you can fill a handful of books on a nearby bookshelf with entries on the items, people, creatures, and much more cool stuff that you see along the way. Not all of it is attainable as you play the game, but one member of your crew can be deployed to locations on a map, for a small fee, and he'll return with stuff to fill up your books. The coolest part of the items you find on your own are the gaming icons of Capcom's past, which offers up plenty of memories for Capcom fans to enjoy collecting. You can also review motion controls with another crew member and you can even chat with Barbaros about your progress in piecing him back together. Once you're ready to play some more, the captain of the Sea Rabbits holds the map where you can choose your next adventure to partake in. A common thread in Capcom games seems to be the strange methods of saving, and Zack & Wiki is no different, as the game autosaves when you return from beating a level, but there's no direct way to save the game. The big hint you get is to exit the game first before turning off your Wii, so that you don't lose any progress. Luckily, that's more of an annoyance than a hindrance, but it'd be nice for those OCD gamers to have a direct ability to save the game instead of quitting and hoping that it really saved.

Graphically, Zack & Wiki continues to prove that Wii games can best succeed in the graphics department by focusing on art direction instead of realism. Zack & Wiki's colorful cel-shaded graphics are a joy to look at, as Zack and Wiki are full of life that you'll notice as you navigate them towards your goal. Motion-controlled puzzles feature an illustration of what you're supposed to do, but don't always succeed in showing you exactly what to do, so it takes some trial and error the first few times. Load times only appear between levels and can be fairly lengthy, which is usually around 10-20 seconds at times. Luckily, that load time allows any restarts, which are sure to be plentiful, to happen instantly with no load time at all.

Zack & Wiki does feature pretty good music, though you shouldn't expect too much from it. It's not going to blow you away, but it does a nice job at complimenting the levels you're navigating. With all of the puzzles in the game, the sound effects keep up with all of that variety quite nicely. Even the speaker in the Wii Remote is used when using Wiki as a bell, along with a nice use of the vibration of the Wii Remote, which rumbles as you move over important parts of the levels. Don't expect much in terms of voice acting, as you'll hear at most a grunt or noise at the beginning of a sentence while you read the text.

Zack & Wiki is easily the best original Wii game on the system right now, though whether it strikes a chord with the Wii's audience is another discussion all together. For most of the core gamers that own a Wii, Zack & Wiki should be right up their alley for a purchase. While it may be kid-friendly in appearance, the game may be a bit much for kids to play alone, but may be something parents could play with their kids to get the whole family involved in the game. Zack & Wiki is definitely full of treasure, but now it's up to you to start the search.

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