I imagine there was some need for the capcom's old arcade team to prove themselves going into the demise of clover. taking over the reins from one of the most critically acclaimed development teams of the era was no small feat, and while the staff sowed the seeds of real powerhouses like itsuno-era devil may cry and monster hunter, there were also a lot of clunkers along the way. in between the oft-forgotten resident evil outbreak series and the infamous resident evil 6 a team led by director eiichiro sasaki tried their hand at something fresh and interesting on wii, yielding the charming and family-friendly point-and-click adventure zack & wiki near the start of the console generation. it's unfortunate that playing the game now is an unnecessarily arduous experience frought with intentional frustration at every turn.

there are a couple smart choices to z&w's puzzle design that make initial impressions positive; after all, I played this as a kid and thought it fascinating if a little too difficult for me at the time. the game is divided up into levels that feature self-contained puzzles, keeping all required items for a puzzle within the locality. there's also a regular group of items that reappears between most puzzles, which helps each puzzle from getting too into the weeds with unexplained objects. it's unfortunate that the game still never makes it past simple "try every holdable item with every single interactable part of the map" puzzles, which doesn't exactly make for invigorating brainteasers. some puzzles push the envelope a bit more with clever little twists, and when these clicked I felt legitimately proud to deduce their answers. the mirror mirror puzzle is not particularly complex but it's one of the most fun and playful in the game and its ending coup de grace legitimately put a smile on my face. some of the other puzzles draw from similar puzzles from other capcom titles, including the light beam puzzle that's in dmc3 (reappears in re5 iirc) and the chemical mixing puzzle from resident evil. however, rarely does it live up to its potential in terms of the raw design, and it exacerbates the myriad of other issues with the game.

the developers were pretty clear in interviews that they entirely intended to add some supposedly-needed brutality to the genre by introducing death as an intrinsic mechanic in many puzzles. I'm not inherently against this, as it gives fail states a little flavor, and it teaches the player which solutions aren't worth pursuing. however the team was hell-bent on making you start the entire puzzle over each and every time you die, and considering how frequent death comes, you will have to needlessly replay puzzles constantly. this is already such a waste of the player's time, but when combined with a puzzle structure that requires constant experimentation with item combinations, adding often unforseen death to the mix is excruciating for the game's pace and a great disservice to the concept. thanks to the outcry from western playtesters, a way to revive at checkpoints was added, but it costs in-game money via tickets that can only be purchased in the hub which also constantly get more expensive in a game where grinding cash involves replaying old puzzles again. there are also many puzzles that feature softlocks if steps are done out of order, and the game will let you waste tickets on reviving without letting you know that you've softlocked yourself! eventually I began saving tickets for emergencies only (such as failing the ungodly motion control sections) and felt obligated to slog through puzzle openings over and over again.

as a sidebar, there's also a scoring system built into the game that seems entirely superfluous and in some cases confusing. once all the steps are memorized for a given level, it's trivial to replay it optimally and get a high score, so why even bother having it? it's tacked on in a way that feels overconfident in the soundness of the concept without considering that puzzles games aren't really the same as skill-based action games. this gets even worse when you get max points for doing something before finding out that you're actually doing it out of order and the score-counter isn't nuanced enough to tell, which makes it even more confusing when you get softlocked after the game gives you positive feedback on your actions.

there is one thing barring players from maxing out score on each level after solving the puzzle, and that are the motion controls. man does this game really believe in the promise of the wii as a platform for interacting with the game more directly, and it really leans hard into stuffing the game full of absolutely broken yet mandatory sections with motion controls. actions feel sluggish and delayed given that they're evidently scripted and awaiting some arbitrary input rather than truly mapping the control to the wiimote itself. some particularly bad ones include the fishing minigame, the spider baseball section, sword fighting (red steel eat your heart out!!), and worst of all that anchor toss in the final boss. that final one not only really fucked with my arm (this whole game really caused a lot of wear-and-tear on my arm, which was already shaky from daily IIDX sessions) but also completely confused me on how the actual toss worked because of the lack of tutorialization. even guides admitted to not understanding how it works until I eventually found a gamefaqs forum explanation: instead of flicking the wrist to toss after spinning up to max speed, smoothly angle the wiimote down towards the screen. entirely unintuitive and the exact opposite of the intention: it pulled me completely out of the game and killed my immersion.

this is on top of shaky pointing and clicking in a supposed point-and-click game, clunky object interactions, and a general over-animation to certain aspects of the game (such as the revival menu) that slows down an already meandering genre to an absolute crawl. in the first boss stage (the giant monkey in the ruins) I somehow managed to wedge myself into a ledge literally softlocking me from being unable to move and forcing me to restart at the very end of the puzzle. it's even worse in instances where the game requires you to book it lest you get killed by not moving fast enough, which especially becomes painful when using a ticket respawns you right before you're about to die and you end up wasting your new lease on life because zack won't get his ass into gear. half the time his path-finding algorithm decides to have him loop around walking away from your target rather than taking the direct route. picking up objects can take multiple clicks (especially since the camera angle changes and can push your pointer off an intended object), and zack's lengthy animations for simple tasks make replays an utter chore. just so many paper cuts to try to wade through this game that you're better off not even trying.

the final world before the endgame actually dialed back on the needless death and had a couple simple but breezy puzzles in a row that gave me a little hope that maybe the underlying concepts were good and it was just held back by a thick veil of jank. there's even a monhun-esque siege on a ship that takes place before the final levels and was surpisingly fair - allowing you to have a health bar in that section is a great compromise between forcing you to think on the fly while also not making single mistakes result in total failure. those final two levels though... the first one builds upon the complexity of other levels tenfold and quickly escalates into classic point-and-click moon logic territory. many potential softlocks, long and seemingly unrelated chains of steps, logic that doesn't apply across separate items (why can I carry flakes in the chalice and not the empty vases sitting around near the flake dispenser?), and the godawful sword-fighting that can only be avoided by waiting for slow guard cycles you must sneak around. it even dropped to a choppy half-framerate anytime I walked in the upper left corner of the map! totally draining and would likely take hours without a guide, especially if you don't wanna waste tickets to save them for if guard fights go awry. the final boss further continues the pain parade through a gauntlet of motion control challenges, including that atrocious anchor throw section mentioned earlier. it's honestly difficult to review games the way I do it (generally writing the review without outlining in a single burst right after finishing) because of how few games stick the landing, but this is really a next level cavalcade of shit right at the very end. I wanted to give this just a smidge of the benefit of the doubt but it really had to lean into all of its worst aspects right before the credits rolled.

sorry to all the fans of this game I upset, but man this is the worst game I've played in a long while. I rarely feel like I waste my time playing something, especially since writing a negative review can be cheap heat on backloggd, but I truly did not enjoy the vast majority of my time playing this in a way that was really draining.

Reviewed on Jun 10, 2022


3 Comments


1 year ago

I always wanted to play this but only had a Wii briefly. Looks like I missed nothing XD

1 year ago

The worst failures are games that are only a couple better choices away from being legitimately good

1 year ago

@FallenGrace same here, I was very excited to play this after i rebought it, i hadn't had a copy in years

@DJS i totally agree. with some sort of rewind/checkpointing system this would be a couple stars higher, and removing the motion controls could potentially push it even further