Oh man, what a fool I have been. Here I was, stuck in ignorant bliss of the world around me, excited for every Wii game set to come out. Escape From Bug Island, well, it has a stupid title, but gameplay>graphixzorz! It'll be great! Not only does this game effectively break anything good about survival horror games from the past, but it singlehandedly made me cry and sent me into horrific diarrhea, shattering all hopes for good in the world and made me feel like self-mutilation. Here, I shall explain why.
You start off by seeing 3 blocky people get off an even blockier boat.
One of them has a rifle, for no explicable reason. It then takes you to
a controls tutorial where your gun-bearing friend teaches you how to
play the game, and then teases you for liking the girl that went on the
trip with you. He then talks you into asking her out at night by the
campfire: the ultimate romantic setting. Then, just as your about to
ask the question, he asks her out instead. then they up and leave, and don't come back.
Before I start vomiting up my intestines due to this completely and
utterly retarded "twist", let me clarify some of the things I've
already said. When I say controls, I mean pressing two buttons at once
and swinging the remote. It doesn't matter how you swing it. Your
character will always do the same motion over and over again. And you
have to hold two buttons at once to to pretty much everything, which
shows a lack of though or insight in the controls. A lack of thought
pretty much sums up the game, really. Almost everything involves
swinging the remote, and they don't even work that well. Your attacks
are the same thing over and over again, so no immersion is had at all. Immersion is the first and most pivotal rule of survival horror that this game defecates upon.
Next, lets discuss the graphics. Super Mario 64 trounces this game in that category. I don't even mean because it's more colorful. I mean it's technically more impressive than Bug Island. That's all I have to say on the matter.
And my absolutely favorite part: the dialogue. It's so bad, I put it in
its own category. Everything your character says seems to have no
purpose or meaning other than to awkwardly progress the stupid plot, sometimes inexplicably.
Everything is short fragments, and it seriously reads how you would
expect a 4th grader's dialogue between two friends would read. The
story is pure crap at best, the cause of nuclear genocide at worst, leaning towards the latter.
If you manage to make it past the terrible dialogue and cutscenes where, for some inane reason, Butch McGunslinger keeps aiming his 12 gauge at your eyebrow every time he says anything, you'll find some enemies, some of which are stupid, others of which are OK. There's these little fish larvae that can jump 30 feet in the air to divebomb you from the sky. To kill them, you hold down two buttons and waggle. Big surprise. Then you have the Mantis creatures, which is really the only good thing about this game, that these creatures have the potential to be frightening. You kill these by holding down 1 and up on the D-pad on the Wiimote, and pressing up and down simultaneously on the joystick. Okay, I made that up, but it might as well be that in terms of intuition. Each area has a certain amount of Manti, moth creatures, which are hard as hell to hit, and cuccoons. It deals out points according to how many you killed.
In the first area, there are a few cabins. When you go inside to check them out, you'll find the funniest notes in videogame history. The notes will say things like, "My girlfriend just got ripped in half and devoured. I hope she's alright." It really would make me laugh for hours on end if the music that played during the letter cutscenes wasn't the worst, most grating orchestra score I've ever heard. Just thinking about it makes me want to perform emergency brain surgery on myself. You also meet up with some stupid gorilla thing that you have to fight.
Now, you may be wondering why I keep talking about the first area so much. The reason is that this game is so horrible, I TURNED IT OFF AFTER HALF AN HOUR, which is far too much time to put into such an abomination.
The only thing I feel bad about in this whole review is my comparison to
Super Mario 64. To all Nintendo fans, SM64 was the classic of its time,
and I can agree it may have been wrongful to even mention it in the
same review as this game, but It served its purpose. Don't buy this
game. Don't even rent this game. Don't even think about this game
anymore. Once you're done reading my review, clear it from your mind. I
played the game, so I will suffer the awful memories that follow. I've
been given a curse, and that curse is named Escape from Bug Island. Like I said before, a half hour is too much time to invest in this game, unless it involves getting together with the neighbors, throwing the disc into an oil drum and lighting a match, all the while mumbling a prayer to guarantee the games condemnation to the seventh circle of Hell: a fate far too merciful.
