Score
Gameplay:	9
Graphics:	7
Sound:	7
FunFactor:	8
PlasmaFactor:	9
Overall:	8

Heatseeker Review
August 30, 2007 by Michael Gettings

 After hearing about Heatseeker, you were probably scratching your head. The Wii, while not having a shortage of great games, isn’t exactly known for its jet fighting titles. And most third party Wii games tend to fall flat, relying on one gimmick over and over and over, repeat ad nauseam.

I’m happy to say that "Heatseeker" glides past both of these bumps with stylish ease. Naturally, that’s not to say it doesn’t have a few faults here and there, but come on. It’s a jet fighter game for the Wii. All you have to do is use your imagination and then you can start to see the large scale destruction.

 

Now, Carefully Ease This Baby Into the Sky

 

Typical airplane games tend to have varying degrees of flaws, the most glaring usually being the fact that if you don’t actually fly an aircraft in real life, then you’re pretty much out of luck. Hyper-realism in flight games has never been my thing and it usually ends up with me throwing a controller down, calling the game unbeatable, and then having my Dad come in and finish the game while I go run laps or box my brother for stress relief.

Heatseeker does away with most of these nagging little problems. The first mission starts you not on the ground, but already in the sky. Movement is as easy as pointing the Wiimote where you want your plane to move. Point it at the right side, the plane banks right. Point it at the left, the plane banks left. Up, down? Yeah, it’s all right there. Your plane comes equipped with a large amount of goodies, varying from different kinds of missiles, bombs, and guns. As the enemy aircraft (land craft, sea craft) approaches, you get a distance meter. Your targeting can be toggled using the "A" button, which makes locking onto close enemies sometimes a bit tricky as it tends to cycle between enemies rather than choosing the one closest to you, but it’s no problem. Once you get within firing range, you here two simple words.

"Target Locked."

That’s when you fire. Send a missile through the air, and watch it collide with the enemy plane. Oh yeah. That’s good carnage. To up the ante, the developers included an "Impact Cam" so you can watch your explosive destroy in glory. Hold down the firing button to track your missile from the belly of your plane to the belly of the enemy. Attacking ground targets is easy, thanks to competent reticules, and the list of unlockables is longer than my arm. Every mission offers goodies, which ups the replay value tons. Weapons range from basic missiles to the cruise variety (no, not Tom, although sure, we’d like to strap him to a warhead) to EMPs.

Don’t expect to just fight a plane one on one. Most missions will have you taking out over 30 bogeys. It’s a good thing you have infinite ammo.

 

If You Look Out The Window, We’re Flying Over The Grand Canyon…

 

Sadly, the game play is offset a tiny, tiny bit by somewhat dated graphics. Your plane looks good. Pretty good. The water…well the water looks like a felt blanket. The sky is a big blue mass. The enemy planes do get a fair amount of detail, which is good, and the explosions will rock you all night, sweet Suzy.

While the graphics don’t hurt the game a great deal, they don’t do much to bring up the score and make most of the missions relatively bland. A nice addition, however, was the ability to boost the speed of your jet, which makes everything in your periphery very, very blurry. The simulation of speed was something I highly enjoyed. It was quite fun to turbo out, blow up a plane, and then easily flip around and fire off a volley of rockets before turboing back out to the main objective point.

 

Ain’t No John Denver in Your Plane

 

There’s thumping metal music (the unnamed kind that would be played in elevators…if elevators played thumping metal music). The music in the game reminds me somewhat of what I would expect if I were to shop at a punk-rock grocery store.

The jet sounds are great, though. When entering turbo, there’s a distinct whooshing noise. Firing guns, while not ultra realistic, is a nice compliment to the background tracks. Explosions sound wonderful, and if I had an incredible sound system, I would throw around things like, "Oh, you can hear the planes blow up in 1080 hi-def ADI THS." Sadly, I just have my television speakers, so all I can say is, "Stuff blows up really well."

Faux-punk punctuated clearly by definitive explosions every couple of seconds? I can definitely live with this.

The voice acting is about par. It’s nothing above or beyond what you’d expect, but it didn’t make me want to pop my ear drums.

 

Are We Having Fun Yet?

 

Yes. Yes, a thousand times, yes. I hardly play airplane games. There’s too much to manage. Wing details, landing gear, flight headers, a dozen different read outs, and then next thing you know, the oxygen masks are dropping and you didn’t even realize you were flying a commercial plane.

No ammo readouts. Your altimeter is a small series of numbers that either go up or down. Nothing too fancy, not a lot to keep an eye on. The creators took a note out of the big bad book of destruction and instead allow the player to focus on what really matters: Flying fast, launching rockets, blowing up planes, and looking stylish while you do it. That’s not to say there aren’t rough patches here or there. Once, my camera did not return to my plane after the impact cam. Another time, I reached a checkpoint for destroying a plane right before a missile hit a ground base, effectively failing me after the checkpoint saved, forcing me to go back through the mission. It wasn’t a huge deal the game is fun enough to the point where it’s not only possible to look past stuff like this, but it might just help you work on your strategy. And that’s nothing I’ve ever said about a glitch before.

 

 

 

Nonstop Flight to Destruction

 

On a good day, I would say this game is excellent and a worthy addition to any library of Wii games. On a bad day, I would say the game is an excellent rental, worthy of the money you would spend and worth your time. The controls are fluid, the game play is fun, the sound is right on and the graphics do their thing, pretty well, too. What are my main gripes? That not enough people are going to play this game.