When I pick up a game I usually either love, hate it, or have a mixed bag of both feelings for it. This is one of those games that I pick up and have mixed feelings about. It’s called Zack and Wiki Quest for Barbaros Treasure for the Wii. So, is this game great? Or does this pirate need to keep sailing? Let’s set sail and find out!
The story takes place in an airplane with our main heroes Zack and Wiki, who are on their way to the Sea Rabbit Pirate hideout. They then get surprise attacked by an evil pirate gang. They crash land on an island and find a treasure chest with a golden skull inside it named Barbaros. The skull tells Zack and Wiki if they can find the rest of his body, he will lead them to great amounts of treasure. It is up to Zack and Wiki to travel across the sea and find the rest of Barbaro’s body. It’s your typical pirate story, but it has charm more so than One Piece Unlimited Adventure, which is the only other pirate game on the Wii that I can think of.
The game play is an adventure puzzle game. You travel across levels, which are all set up to be one big puzzle, and you solve the problems that come your way in order to get the big treasure chest in the end. You use your monkey friend, Wiki, to transform animals into useful items like saws, gripping devices, bombs, and etc. You also use the Wii mote to pull off certain moves, like playing the flute, sawing the tree, cooking soup, and other uses which is fun to use. The boss fights are all also set up like puzzles, where like in a Zelda game, you have to solve a somewhat challenging puzzle to hurt the monster that is guarding the treasure.
I wouldn’t say this game is easy, but it isn’t a walk in the park either. Some areas you might get through easily in just a few minutes, but other areas will take a while to get over and beat. It revolves around a trial and error kind of system where you die and try again until you get past that one part. The graphics and the character designs really stand out in the library of Wii games. They are really impressive, and I like the whole cartoon cell shade look really fits the game. Everything just has a charm that will pull you in to play more and more.
Okay on to the bad parts. The only way to move Zack around is to point and click where to go. It kind of like this game was meant for the PC, but I can understand they want to use the Wiimote the way that they use it. Some of the puzzles can get really annoying, and you will need to be patient to get through the puzzles. It’s sad that you need to be patient to get through most of the puzzles, since most of the clues won’t be in plain sight.
All and all, after playing this game, I really enjoyed it. I would highly recommend picking up this title and adding it to your good Wii collection. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a sequel planned for it since in every pirate story, there is always another adventure waiting for you.
This game gets a 9 out of 10
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