Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked (Wii)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.5 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Carolyn Petit
• Reviewed on: 10/13/2008
• Released on: 09/23/2008
• Originally published on GameSpot: Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked (Wii) Review

From Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe to the contemporary castaways of Lost, stories of island survival have long fired the human imagination. Throughout the course of three DS games, Konami's Lost in Blue series has tried to tap into this primal experience, but the adventurous elements have repeatedly been bogged down by tedious micromanagement. Now, Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked brings the series to the Wii, but rather than representing a fresh start, the larger scale of this iteration only serves to magnify the flaws that have plagued the earlier games.

You play as Aidan Sanders, a 16-year-old child of privilege who escapes a sinking cruise ship with his pet monkey Hobo and awakes to find himself on a tropical island. There, he must fend for himself, scavenging the island for food and supplies with which he can build the makeshift tools he needs to survive. It's not long before he's able to toss together a raft capable of taking him to another nearby island, where he meets up with Lucy, another survivor of the shipwreck. The two of them team up to explore the island and try to figure out how to get home. There are a few different directions the story can go in, depending on your actions, but in general, there isn't much attention paid to things like plot and character development. The focus here is on survival.

As you would expect, surviving on the islands is not easy. Unfortunately, it's also not much fun. Your characters have food, water, and stamina levels, which are in a constant state of rapid decline. You can rarely go for very long without resting, drinking, or eating, and you'll spend a great deal of your time just catching fish or hunting land animals to prepare your meals rather than exploring the island. And even considering the accelerated rate at which time passes, the amount of food the characters need to consume to sustain themselves seems outrageous. A meal made from four whole fish or from all the meat off a slaughtered wild boar might only fill Aidan or Lucy's stomach roughly halfway. It's fitting that concerns about food, water, and sleep play an important role in a game about life on an island, but Shipwrecked doesn't balance these concerns with the other aspects in an enjoyable way. The unending focus on micromanaging your characters' stats quickly grows tedious and drowns any enjoyment you might have found in the simple pleasures of island life. If you manage to survive and progress, you'll eventually be able to build creature comforts for your base camp, as well as more effective, durable tools that make your existence easier, but it's a long, dreary struggle just to get to that point. Even then, these concerns are never put aside for long.

Even when you are able to focus for a short while on island exploration, a number of frustrations hobble what should be an enjoyable endeavor. You'll constantly need to scale ledges as you make your way across the terrain, but with the camera positioned behind Aidan, it's often impossible to tell if you can make your way down until you walk up to an edge, at which point he'll either climb down or cry out in fear. There's a minimap that shows your immediate surroundings, but if you get lost (which isn't difficult), the map is useless for helping you find your way back to base camp. Although you need to take Lucy with you on your expeditions for practical reasons--you can carry twice as much stuff if she's with you and push rocks with her help that Aidan can't budge on his own--she needs a lot of help. For example, you'll have to help her up or down from nearly every ledge and across every jump, which really slows you down, making her seem like the embodiment of a helpless female stereotype. (Absurdly, she also wears high heels as she hikes across the island.) There should be an intrinsic pleasure to the experience of exploring--of finding out what lies beyond the next ridge--but these issues make it more of a chore.

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Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked (Wii): $17.49 - $28.99

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