Soon Ford will find himself being yanked in multiple directions as loyalties shift, friends become enemies and an alien race called The Drudge shows up and invades Washington DC. The story is nothing groundbreaking and riffs on familiar themes of alien visitors and domestic power grabs. The ASE can be used to discover hidden messages if you take the time to look for them and in these messages with their many layered references to alien abductions, alien races, long dead human civilizations and historical events you'll get an even greater idea of how deep this plot is supposed to go. It's obvious that the game's creators took a lot of time researching events for all of these references so it's an odd choice to hide the best part of the story away from the player. Heck, one of the biggest revelations comes during the voice overs that play over the ending credits. I'm not one for spoon feeding the player, but at the same time, making some of these messages a little easier to find may have made the story feel less generic.

Granted, you're not necessarily here for the story, you're here for the shooting and you'll do plenty of it. The game quickly ramps up in difficulty providing a good challenge on the default difficulty levels. Once the Drudge show up, entering areas through the titular conduits, battles quickly become a tactical choice of rushing in to disable the conduits at risk of life and limb, but with the reward of stopping the flow of enemies, or taking a more methodical approach at the risk of running out of ammo due to the endless stream of foes.

Along with conduits, alien nests are hidden throughout the levels providing a constant stream of lesser enemies that, on a one on one basis don't provide much of a threat, but that can quickly gang up on you. Knowing that attacks can come from any direction provides a nice tense atmosphere to the battles and ensures that you stay on your toes at all times.

Between the human weapons, the Trust advanced technology, and the Drudge weapons, whether you want to take someone out in a hail of bullets, energy blasts or richocheting bits of biomass becomes a matter of personal choice. The more advanced weapons have additional abilities such as charged up shots as well as some motion capabilities such as leading the shot to your opponent by moving the Wiimote, or changing the spread of the weapon by twisting it. You'll also find special experimental weapons along the way that usually amount to one shot kills which makes them an easy choice, up until they run out of ammo. Unfortunately there's no way to see any information about your weapons while in the game meaning that you'll either have to experiment in the field, wasting ammo in the process or pause the game to check the manual. Having to constantly fish out the manual to check out the details on your new toy can make the early parts of the game somewhat disjointed if you're not the experimental type.

You'll have plenty of opportunities to experiment as the game has no problem throwing bunches of enemies at you. Unfortunately their strength lies more in numbers than in brains as the AI isn't entirely consistent. Sometimes they show tactical smarts by flanking and using grenades as well as the alt fire mode of their weapons. There's nothing like being reminded that the alien strike rifle has a charged up shot by taking one in the chest, depeleting 3/4 of your health in the process. Other times the enemies will run up to you and then pass by allowing you to quickly turn and melee them. They'll also leave you alone so that your health can regenerate which certainly works to your advantage but at the same time, if I knew that my opponent had regenerative abilities, I wouldn't stop firing until they were a greasy wad on the pavement.

With all of the enemies running about and projectiles flying the game never chugs or stutters. Simply put, The Conduit is one of the best, if not the best looking game on the Wii. If you look closely you can see the various tricks used to pull this off, namely long, linear corridors and static backgrounds used for outdoor levels. Still though, it's impressive to look at the various stylish choices like a slight blur effect when reloading or when zooming in gives the game an impressive sense of style. All of the various weapons are modeled well with distinct reloading animations. It all comes together in a great looking package that hopefully will spur other developers on to making better looking games for the Wii. As an added bonus, once the level loads, behind cover of voice work, there's no additional loading.