Purchase Elebits

After reading the premise of the game and seeing the excited reviews, we decided to pick up what we thought would be a sleeper hit. The price was fantastic, but should have tipped me off. I have since discovered that the value of used Wii games is often an indicator of their quality (simple economics).

Based on what I'd read, my hopes were set on a quirky, story-driven, shooting-gallery-style exploration game. Strangely enough, that's exactly what it is, but to my dismay, we discovered this was a very bad thing.

Elebits suffers from two major flaws. First, the game is intentionally tedious. Using your laser beam, you manipulate items around the more-or-less normal household to find tiny monsters called Elebits, which power the electricity in the house. The more Elebits you discover, the more power you have, which allows you to...discover more elebits. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. The real killer for me is that every level has HUNDRED of elebits to discover, and each level is governed by a countdown timer that limits the number you can actually find. (This doesn't really prevent you from progressing to the next level, since the number of elebits needed to do that is relatively small, but why not let gamers take their time? What's the rush??). But the tedium of racing the clock, searching under every nook and cranny of a mundane room wore on me swiftly. Add to that the absolute chaos created by the laser tossing items every whichaway, and I had to force myself to want to play a second time.

This is where the second major flaw came in. I finally picked up the game and pushed through level one. One of the enjoyable pressures I experience in completing a game is the desire to see what the next level will look like. I've come to expect a certain level of creativity and beauty in exploring the alternative worlds video games have to offer. But the alternative world THIS game has to offer is merely the boring house of a bratty kid. The house has regular house stuff in it: toasters, vacuum cleaners, books, closets...all of them movable and all of them teaming with elebits, which honestly did precious little to make these mundane items more interesting. I mean really. I see my toaster every day. So after beating the first level (which is the boy's bedroom), I progressed to level two...the hallway! Which has, as an added bonus, a bathroom! At some point during this level (I think it was while I was knocking elebits out of the bathroom toilet), I woke up and thought, You know what? Who cares? And put the game up for sale the next day. Fortunately, someone bought it. (Sorry, dude, wherever you are!)

Pros:
Inexpensive...cheapest Wii game I've bought so far (but there's a reason for that!).
Kid friendly. My children understood the controls and the premise easily enough. (But they were bored with it too.)

Cons:
Repetitive and tedious from the outset.
Levels lack requisite variety required to provide satisfying progress.
Despite a clever premise, game fails imaginatively. You explore...a house.
Overwhelming number of objectives ruled by a stress-inducing countdown timer.
Storyline is flat and arbitrary.Get more detail about Elebits.