 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Her Interactive |
| Publisher: | SEGA | |
| Genre: | Adventure | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
It’s not surprising that Her Interactive has brought the Nancy Drew series to Wii; after all, the Wii has become a hotbed for PC adventure game ports, and the franchise is geared towards pre-teen girls. What is surprising is that they teamed up with none other than SEGA to help make it happen. That should give you some idea about just how popular the franchise has been on PC, and what kind of impact it could make in the console realm as well.
For Nancy Drew’s Wii debut, Her Interactive chose to bring The White Wolf of Icicle Creek to the console, which is actually the 16th game in the series. After a series of strange accidents at the Icicle Creek Lodge in the Canadian Rockies, Nancy is called upon to investigate and determine if there’s a saboteur afoot. Pretty much everyone staying at the lodge is a suspect, with a cast including a sophisticated lady into bird watching, a middle-aged Canadian relaxing, a California student that likes to create art with dirt, and a world-champion skier from the fictional Russia-esque country of Fredonia. Complicating things is the white wolf that hangs out in the area, seemingly unafraid of humans and possibly connected to the accidents in some way.
To allow Nancy to move about the lodge freely, the player assumes the role of the lodge’s new maid and cook. To make it convincing, Nancy must tidy up the patrons’ rooms as well as cook three square meals a day while sleuthing…all while fitting it into an accelerated day/night cycle. This cycle plays an important role in the game, as Nancy’s travels outside the lodge are restricted during the evening and early mornings due to extreme cold and Nancy must cook and clean at the proper times.
The cooking mini-game has been vastly improved from the PC original. In the original game, the player had to fix a combination of meals from memory based on the orders that were placed. It was a little tedious, and the actual act of cooking wasn’t much fun. In this version however, cooking now involves simple gestures with the Wii Remote, such as thrusting downwards to slice, or holding down the A button and moving the Wii Remote around to coat a pan with cooking spray. The format has also changed as now there’s just one dish to serve to each guest per meal (for example, French toast in the morning), and the game displays instructions on-screen about what to do next. Unfortunately the trade off is a little less accuracy (a few times the Wii Remote failed to register my movements and I ended up with burnt food), but there’s no real penalty when this happens and the actual act of cooking is far more fun regardless. There are several more mini-games as well, including a take on Minesweeper, the board game Fox & Geese, and a Ski Free like snowmobile section.
Another sign that this port was given a lot of care is found in the revamped UI, which now features bigger tabs for inventory and notes (accessed with the minus and plus buttons) with less on-screen clutter. The bigger tabs compensate well for the less-accurate Wii Remote (compared to a mouse), and everything is more readily accessible, although inventory management is still a little clunky (icons could’ve been bigger and there’s no button to put up an item without re-opening the inventory and dropping it). The B button also makes it easier now to back out of close-up looks, versus pointing at the bottom of the screen for the proper icon.
Unfortunately the transition to Wii has not been a perfect one, in particular the fact that there are far too many load times. As an old-school adventure game played from the first-person perspective (like Myst), the player must point and click on the screen each time he or she wants to move around the area. Each click moves the player a few feet in the selected direction, or interacts with the particular highlighted object. By nature this is an archaic and non-fluid form of movement, and on Wii virtually every click is accompanied by a few seconds of load time. Seriously, my Wii pretty much whirred constantly during the game, always streaming new data from the disc. While I wouldn’t expect Her Interactive to add in Nunchuk movement for the Wii version, I suspect that some intelligent loading could’ve been added in there that caches areas immediately beside the player in memory to reduce load times. There were also no improvements made to the graphics (other than the cooking section and the UI of course), which feature decent-looking pre-rendered environments but minimal animation.
Bottom Line:
It’s not hard to see why Her Interactive debuted the Nancy Drew series on Wii with The White Wolf of Icicle Creek, as it already had several mini-games built-in that translate well to the platform, especially the revamped cooking section. With Junior and Senior difficulty levels (and the latter actually providing a good challenge) and smart Wii-specific additions, Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is an excellent addition to the Wii’s burgeoning adventure game lineup and caters to a slightly different audience than titles like Sam & Max: Season One do. Now if they can just do something about those pesky load times for the next release…
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 7.5 |
Posted: 2009-01-12 19:56:08 PST