Since we at the Alliance had our first glimpse of the Wii’s new control mechanism, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it. Sure, there would be plenty of unique and quirky applications that promise to innovate and boggle our brains; but we, like many gamers, love to shoot stuff. Call it what you will, but First Person Shooters get a lot of playtime around here. We were naturally excited when we heard that one of our favorite PC shooters from a while back, FarCry, would be trying to bring its lush jungle scenery and intense gunplay to the Wii. This would be good. Or maybe it would be a disaster. Either way, it’s our job, so we dove in to FarCry: Vengeance.

Upon booting the game, we had to do a double take. Had we inadvertently downloaded an old virtual console game instead of what we intended to play? No, this is FarCry, and the graphics are horrible. Not just bad, this takes crap to another level. This title honestly looks like it got pulled straight off the N64. For the record, that’s two generations back, not just one. It’s been said that graphics don’t make a game, and that’s true. However, when they’re this bad you can’t help but disagree with that statement at least a little bit.

Moving on from that visual disaster, we find that we actually have to start playing the game. The gameplay was totally fine, if your definition of “totally fine” is rancid garbage. The controls are unresponsive and poorly mapped. Thanks to the atrocious control scheme, aiming is far more difficult than it should be, but still allows you to hit enemies even of you’re off by a couple of feet. The unresponsiveness of the controls makes it nearly impossible to be effective in a firefight, and the terrible graphics certainly don’t give you any help. It’s a little hard to draw a bead on a target that’s nothing more than a muddy block hiding behind some other muddy blocks. The objectives in the campaign are very obtuse and unclear as well, so don’t be surprised when you find yourself stuck. That’s if you actually have the patience to play long enough to get stuck. Most people won’t make it through 10 minutes of this game; and to those of you that do, I feel your pain.

There’s a split screen multiplayer mode, but the problems pretty much just increase in that mode. Graphics and control both take a noticeable hit when there are two players, and with where this game started, multiplayer ends up being an unplayable joke.

FarCry: Vengeance is an unplayable and sorry excuse for a game. It should never have been released, and we can’t figure out how the hell something this bad would ever get e green light. Do yourself a favor and stay far away from this game, or it will likely make you cry.