How I Wet Your Mother - Water Warfare

By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman

Hudson Soft’s Water Warfare is a game that’s easily judged by its cover. Set as an FPS with squirt guns, whimsical locales and dated graphics; it’s not hard to see many writing this game off as some kiddy game (and in some regards, they’re right in doing so). Though the single player portion of the game is easy enough to beat in one drunken evening, the multiplayer offers some of the best competitive FPS action I’ve seen on the Wii.

"Everything in the game deals with water... Your life bar is shown as how soaked you are and even the items are water related."

Hudson Soft keeps true to its philosophy in not depicting explicit violence between humans by replacing all the killing normally found in FPSs with soaking. The game stands as a standard (albeit easy) first person shooter with light hearted skins. Machine guns, rifles, shotguns and bazookas all exist in the world of Water Warfare, the only difference being that they’re designed as squirt guns.

With only 32 levels (technically, 38 with 6 being “wireframe” tutorials) split up over 4 different locations, the single player campaign isn’t going to go very far. Nearly every one of the missions/levels is ridiculously short and easy. The only missions that gave me notable trouble were 2-2 and 5-4 (one was due to a map problem and the other was because I didn’t read the objective clearly).

"I love the way the playground level looks. It seems like it would be very fun to run around in real life!"

The objectives have fairly good variety, offering the full gambit of standard arena style FPS modes such as: capture the flag (box), capture control points, team death match, “president” (kill the priority target), checkpoint race, and free for all death match. There’s also a target practice as the first mission of each world to learn the map’s layout and a neat stealth style mission to add to the variety.

"Character customization... Though it's not very deep, it's still pretty cute."

You’ll find most of the game’s ease is due to the fact that the AI is not very bright. In fact, AI in this case should stand for Artificial Idiocy, since the characters like doing moronic things such as shooting you at point blank range even when they’re near death and extremely out gunned. You’ll also notice that when you get teamed up with AIs they also suffer from the same digital retardation; however, this isn’t a really big deal as stupid against stupid will cancel each other out, you just might not get a decent score for the level.

"I think a big part of me liking this game has to do with the fact that I sometimes get to make cutesy girls' T-shirts wet."

The multiplayer is very well implemented for an 800 point WiiWare game. While the split screen mode is not much different from any other console FPS, the online mode is superb. Not only is it comparable to most of the Wii’s disc base online FPSs (all 6 of them), but it might actually have beaten some of them out (I’m looking at you, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2). You can either play with friends or strangers choosing nearly (if not all) of the arena modes previously mentioned. Random matches don’t take very long to setup, which surprises me that other people actually play this game. Another big surprise is that the competition is pretty fierce here; you’re going to really need to try to win matches.

"Split screen, once again I'm using press photos."

Though the graphics are something from 6 years ago, they’re bright colorful and really make me happy. I like the character models and love the fact that you can customize your avatar with various faces, hair styles, and clothes (although it’s really more as a service to others, since you only see your character at the match results screen). I also like how you can win the boss skins upon beating them; however, I do wish you could take components from the boss costumes rather than treating it as a full outfit (since I’d just want to give my character a bunny beanie or motorcycle helmet).

The sounds are really stupid here. It’s like they purposefully picked the lamest sound effects to use for everything in this game. I would have rather they used inappropriate sound effects (like the squirt guns making real firearm noises) over what they had in the game. The music sounds like something you’d get in annoying flash game and didn’t even make it past me setting up my account before I had to disable it.

For 800 Wii points you can do a lot worse. While I wish the single player had a bit more maps and levels and that the AI was a bit smarter, the single player isn’t really the main draw of the game. It’s almost like it’s designed to be a primer for the multiplayer just to give you a taste of what you could be doing with other people.

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