First you have to hold down the A button to enter a first-person view, then once you've lined up your shot, you have to hold the B button down as well, and finally swing the Wii Remote downward to throw your projectile. A half-dozen football-sized crickets can prove far deadlier than a couple of 10-foot-tall praying mantises. You can't move once you've started swinging, and lining up with your enemies is difficult, especially when dealing with smaller, faster enemies. General movement is controlled with the analog stick on the Nunchuk, and melee attacks require you to first line yourself up with your enemy, press and hold the B button, and then repeatedly swing the Wii Remote down.and that's pretty much it. When it comes to combat, you've got ranged and melee options, both of which require some lame motion controls to use. Though you'll fight plenty of oversized bugs, it seems ironic that some of your nastiest foes aren't bugs at all: these include flying fish, giant gorillas, Amazonian lizard-women, and dogs with human heads. The stiflingly soupy layers of fog make it hard to see where you're going, though the game makes up for it with a minimap that will almost always tell you exactly where you need to go next.
This means you'll mostly trek across some largely linear levels, fighting bugs and fetching keys to open shack doors, safes, and pieces of luggage. Characters are introduced and killed off at weird, anticlimactic intervals, and everything is so disjointed and poorly explained that it ceases early on being worth the effort to care.Ĭontrary to its title, a good portion of Escape from Bug Island involves working your way deeper into the island as you search for Michelle, the object of your affection. From here, the game's interest in telling a story is scattered. Michelle runs off after this awkward episode, and you spend much of the rest of the game trying to catch up with her and fending off the island's inhabitants. Meanwhile, your swaggering, shotgun-cocking buddy Mike's only purpose for being there is to arbitrarily make a move on Michelle before you can, all of this within the first five minutes of the game. An infatuation with the dainty Michelle, a girl with a hobbyist-level interest in entomology, brings you to this waking hell. You play as Ray, a timid tagalong whose sports-sandals, cut-off jeans, and multi-colored parka vest make him look like he lost his way home from a Phish concert. Rocky terrain and an unrelenting sheet of fog that limits your view to about 20 yards ahead keep it from being much of a vacation spot, and, oh yeah, it's totally infested with gigantic, terrifying bugs that want nothing more than to flay the flesh from your bones and lay a clutch of eggs in your chest cavity! It seems like some government body or scientific group should have this place under military lock and key, and yet you, and other characters you encounter, head to Bug Island like it's a casual thing to do. The Bug Island tourist pamphlet must be awfully convincing.Ī question that might spring to mind early on while playing Escape from Bug Island is, "Why are people going to Bug Island in the first place?" This is a genuinely awful location. That Escape from Bug Island uses the Wii Remote comes off as anachronistic, and it ultimately only exacerbates the clumsy controls.
Amongst other things, the consistently blocky and washed-out visuals, cut-rate animation, and voice work that's not quite bad enough to be funny all drive home the sense that this game missed its window of relevance by a good five years. When you strip away the looming dread of facing overpowered, flesh-eating monstrosities and replace it with A-to-B objectives and lots of fog, as Escape from Bug Island does, the end result is boring and awkward.
Escape from Bug Island is a game out of time, a cheap Resident Evil knockoff of the kind we haven't seen in years, and with good reason.
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