Most of the motion controls in NMH are simple and quick, the most common one you'll see is the need to swing the remote in a direction to finish off an enemy. If anything these controls are too responsive--sometimes I'll pull back to swing in the direction it wants, and my swing in the opposite direction will register. Still, the use of this adds to the immersion in the game nicely. The use of both the nunchuck and the wiimote for wrestling moves isn't quite as precise, with the command sometimes not registering, but the commands that are hard to execute don't come up that often. There is also the simple distinction during fighting of which way the wiimote is pointed, up or down, which determines your "fighting stance," which affects where you hit the enemy. Finally, shaking the wiimote is used to recharge your energy. Both of these work perfectly, as you'd expect. One area in which they could have easily expanded motion control is the powerup which gives you the ability to shoot energy balls. The balls are difficult to aim from the over-the-shoulder perspective and wiimote control for aiming could have easily made this a much cooler powerup. Several minigames also use simple wiimote maneuvers, which generally work most of the time, but not perfectly. They never get incredibly frustrating, but the times when you need to repeat an action 2-3 times can be a bit irritating.
Combat in general is fun, fast, and simple. All attacks are assigned to two buttons: A and B; with your stance altering the aim of the attack. Holding down either results in a more powerful charged attack. This is simple enough, yet it gives you plenty of options to deal with the enemies you encounter. Unfortunately, you'll encounter basically all of the enemies you'll have to deal with by the fourth or fifth mission: normal enemies with some kind of melee weapon, enemies with guns, and enemies with beam katanas. These types have different specifics with more or less health and such, but are all generally the same. Combined with the fact that the environments are fairly generic and the fact that you often revisit every area at least once, and the game can feel fairly repetitive at times. However, this game isn't really about creative enemies or interesting environments, it's really just about taking down waves of enemies, and combat is certainly fun, especially in the areas where you are given large numbers of enemies to slaughter.
In between the fighting, however, is the games biggest weakness. The game attempts to create a GTA-style open-world city in which everything takes place, but Santa Destroy is...well, its boring. There isn't really anything worth stopping to do in between moving from job to job to make money, and then to a ranking battle to progress. There are "lovikov balls" to collect, but all that really amounts to is moving to a dot on your radar and picking one up. The jobs that you must do to unlock assassination missions feel pointless, and are usually boring waggle minigames. Much like other critics of the game have said...you might as well just select missions, shops, or jobs from a menu. The problem is, without the jobs, the assassination missions would feel even more repetitive, and without those, the game would be ridiculously short.
The game takes an interesting direction in style. It uses cell-shaded graphics alongside gallons of blood, combined with stylish slow-motion kills (triggered by a wiimote wave) and quirky, often insane bosses. It gets to the point where you can actually blind yourself with the flood of blood covering the camera. The whole thing seems to come off as somewhat of a parody on violent, senseless action games. The story is comically simple, and almost nothing is resolved by the end, but really, it was just a pretext for finding a way to string together a bunch of fights. The entire game is exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness, and it's one of it's defining features. It's not a system-seller, but if you already own a wii, its a game that's different from most of the other games you have to choose from.
Good:
Visceral combat with hordes of enemies
Quirky style and humor from a game that never takes itself seriously
Good use of motion control outside minigames in a non-party-game Wii title
Bad:
Repetitive enemy and level design
Shallow open world design
Forced to endure waggle minigames to get to the action
Visceral combat with hordes of enemies
Quirky style and humor from a game that never takes itself seriously
Good use of motion control outside minigames in a non-party-game Wii title
Bad:
Repetitive enemy and level design
Shallow open world design
Forced to endure waggle minigames to get to the action
