Jenga World Tour (Wii)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 1.0 stars Terrible
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 2.0 (1.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 12/11/2007
• Released on: 12/07/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Jenga World Tour (Wii) Review

The real game of Jenga is a love/hate kind of thing. The actual act of playing this game of block removal and stacking is pretty fun, but goodness knows it's a pain to stack those things up again after the tower comes tumbling down. Jenga World Tour attempts to remedy that admittedly small annoyance by bringing the game of Jenga to the Wii. No cumbersome blocks to stack here; all you have to do is slide out and stack virtual blocks using the Wii Remote. That all sounds good in theory, except that Jenga World Tour also happens to be functionally broken. The game's physics are wonky as all get out, the artificial-intelligence opponents are either overpowered or brain-dead depending on the situation, and many of the goofily themed stages the developers tossed in to give the game a bit of a wacky flavor are so reliant on random chance that they cease to be fun instantly. Couple all of this with the fact that World Tour costs twice as much as the real game of Jenga, and this stacks up as a pretty terrible deal.

As you would with the real game, you play Jenga World Tour by picking out one of the rectangular blocks that sit in the stack, do your best to pull it out without knocking over the entire structure, and set the removed block on the top of the stack. The players take turns until one sends the whole thing toppling over with an ill-conceived block removal, at which point the game ends. On paper, Jenga World Tour seems as if it should have the goods to deliver a solid interpretation of the game. The Wii controls let you pull at the blocks by holding A and moving the Wii Remote, tap them using the B button to push them out ever so slightly and get a better grip on them, and even pin down a couple of other nearby blocks to keep them from jostling around.

That all sounds like a good scheme, except that it doesn't actually work very well. Moving blocks is an extremely hit-or-miss process. When you've got one in your hand, it's impossible to position the block on the top of the stack with any precision. The game's sense of depth perception seems more than a little faulty, and as a result, you'll often overshoot or undershoot your target multiple times before finally getting even close to where you want to go. Of course, all of this assumes you can even get a block out of the stack. There are times when you'll be able to yank a block out with quick and unobstructed ease, and there are times when you'll be stuck spending minutes trying to inch one block out because it's apparently jammed in there super tight. The amount of yanking you have to do when you get pieces stuck like this is just ridiculous, and sometimes leads to you accidentally knocking other blocks around and toppling the whole thing, which you really shouldn't have had to do.

The frustration of being unable to easily remove certain blocks is compounded by the relative ease with which computer opponents can move the same blocks. The AI can take a turn in less than five seconds flat, and often does. The only time it takes longer is at the very end, when playable blocks are at a premium and the whole stack is teetering like crazy, or if you happen to place a block on the top of the stack in such a way that the AI can't figure out how to place its piece correctly. The only time you can do this is if you're placing the second block on the three-block row, so basically every other row. When you do, try to drop the piece a little bit off from wherever the first piece was placed, so that it's not quite in the middle, but not quite all the way to the opposite end, either. The AI becomes lobotomized at this point and fumbles for minutes at a time trying to place its block down in a suitable fashion. We actually had one instance in which the AI got stuck doing this for upwards of 10 minutes. It's initially high comedy to watch this happen, but it's also rather boring by about the fourth or fifth time.

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