Published by: Hudson Soft
Developed by: Hudson Soft
Release Date: March 9, 2010
Available on: Nintendo Wii
INTRO: You start this game off by visiting a scary website known as “The Black Page”. Unfortunately, the site is cursed and those who visit it tend to die. Not only that, but you’re sucked into the memories of the dead as you linger in post-death limbo or something. And so you will delve into the dead spaces of four different characters looking for the answers to these scary musters.
GAMEPLAY:
I can’t help but feel that I’ve reviewed this game before, when I checked out The Grudge for Wii a few months back. This one borrows heavily once again from J-Horror flicks like Pulse and The Ring. First thing’s first, I hope you love cutscenes because thats how this story is played out and these are totally un-skippable. And you know what else? The cut scenes are usually just plain white text with no ambience on a black background. Bleh.
Anyway, this game has a great start and works well initially. The first couple of levels are really tense and atmospheric, bringing the creepy in the ways you want it to. There’s a lot of boo scares and then faces coming out of nowhere and stuff just popping out to scare the crap out of you. It works well and is actually good enough to keep you riveted if you’re playing at night by yourself.
The controls are relatively sound. The game uses the wiimote/nunchuck combination of things and you’re playing first person, FPS style. You move with the nunchuck and point around with the remote. Unfortunately, this game relies a lot on the ‘Wiimote is a cell phone’ gimmick which sort of falls flat after awhile. It’s really cool at the start as you get some creepy phone calls and listen to a ghostly voice on the other end. Unfortunately, it comes off as drawn out after awhile and feels unnecessary. You always have to punch in the number you want to call- every single time you do it. If you close the phone while putting a number in, you have to do it all over again. This gets really old when you have to use the phone to clear out a room full of nasties and you keep having to dial those digits in again. Frustrating.
When a ghosts grabs you and gets all up in your grill, you (shockingly) waggle the remote and press A when the game asks you to. You’ll miss it a lot because you only have a second to hit the button before the prompt disappears. Your life is represented by the ‘horror meter’, which rises each time you screw up until you eventually die.
Anyway, after about an hour or two with this game you’ll find yourself getting really tired of it really quickly. The design is uninspired and repetitive and you’ll find out that the patterns of things happening just keep on going on, making what you thought was creepy initially into something really dull and disappointing. The gameplay just seems to get slower and slower and becomes really frustrating as it goes along. You’ll run into some really lame puzzles along the way which serve as a way to just piss you off as you go through math puzzles and even the dreaded sliding tile puzzle. Lame.
Walk through a dark area, try to figure out where you’re going, pray to find what you look for, avoid ghosts. Rinse, repeat, the end.
Gameplay: 3.5/10
GRAPHICS:
The graphics here are a mixed bag, falling slightly short of typical Wii standards which generally aren’t very impressive to begin with. The character models look okay and the environments are so-so but the ghosts look pretty terrible and repeat themselves quite a bit. Some of the ghosts look absolutely ridiculous, which is disappointing.
Graphics: 4.5/10
AUDIO:
Sound isn’t too impressive either- there’s a huge lack of it! The voicework is really unimpressive (really bad foreign voiceover work) and the music is missing from most of the game. When tunes finally start to play it’s the most bland and uninspired stuff out there and you barely notice it exists.
Audio: 4/10
FINAL VERDICT:
Calling might be a decent game for those who are really forgiving, scare easy or are very young. For the rest of us, this is another waggle-your-way-through Wii entry that becomes a hassle. I would venture to say that no one will play this game from start to finish in one sitting because the game is just plodding at times. If you love Fatal Frame, you should stick to it. Better yet, pick up Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii as it is a far more enjoyable and well-put together game.
Final Score: 4/10
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