'Staff of Kings' best left buried

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jun 24, 2009

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The story of “Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings” isn’t a total failure, but it might as well be. For the most part, the story is simply absent, with a few hurried words like, “We need to find the Jade Sphere,” being the only access you have to Indy’s motive in any scene. What is present is mostly a retread of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” centering as it does on the archaeologist’s efforts to find a mystical Old Testament artifact before it falls into the hands of his Nazi-employed colleague. There are a few moments that really feel like they are classic Indiana Jones, but they are brief and rare.

Unfortunately, weak as it is, the story is the best thing about the game. The rest of the production is riddled with flaws. It isn’t unplayable, but it’s not very enjoyable.

First and horrifically foremost are the motion controls. Most of the time, if you’re not watching cutscenes that can’t be skipped or walking around, you are shaking the Wii Remote. You shake it to use your whip, to light torches, to knock down walls, and -- worst of all -- to throw punches in a fight. Even if having to constantly shake your hands weren’t annoying enough, actually getting the game to recognize your attacks requires very deliberate movements. By the end of the game it feels like a slow-motion slap-fight simulator.

Around this central pillar of shoddiness, a vast monument to failure has been built. Generally, boring cutscenes that can’t be skipped are coupled with infrequent checkpoints and a large number of ways to die instantly. This ensures that you will repeatedly watch scenes that you didn’t want to watch in the first place. Add to that quick-timed button press events in the middle of some scenes, which you suddenly have to press “A” to jump or mimic a running motion with the Wii remote, and you have some incredibly frustrating and slow gameplay that punishes you for its mistakes.

Even if all of these problems could be excised, what’s left wouldn’t be worth playing. The puzzles are simplistic most of time, requiring you to either notice that one bookcase looks significantly different from the others, or simply walking around until an icon pops up that says it’s time to shake your Wii remote. There are a few genuinely good puzzles toward the end, but despite being enjoyable they conjure up a sense of curious regret. They don’t belong here, really, with tedium before them and tedium afterwards.

“Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings” contains a few brief glimpses of fun, but nothing that could conceivably make it worth digging through the game’s sloppy controls and inconsistent gameplay.