Yu-Gi-Oh takes to the streets in Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s wheelie breakers for the Nintendo Wii. The concept of this title is similar to Mario Kart as you race around a track picking up floating squares that give you random playable “cards” from your hand that can summon creatures and perform speed boosts and various other benefits. Sounds great so far right? Well the concept is definitely there for this to be a top notch racing game.
The environment in this game looks well drawn and animated and fits with the action. The part that tends to throw you off is your character model does not look nearly as nice making it look almost like your character was taken from a Nintendo 64 title and glued into a Wii title. The rest of the graphics and animations seem to be well done though. The sounds in the game are also very well done and the soundtrack keeps the heart pumping throughout the race.
The controls and interface are probably this game’s biggest downfall. The interface puts a picture of the card in the bottom right and text at the bottom of the screen scrolls which tells you what the card does. So you have to somehow read what each card does while steering at high speeds and sometimes when you want to read what a card does it will be half way through the explanation when you look down so you have to wait for it to restart the explanation. This can become very challenging and almost requires you to memorize the use for every card. You steer with the thumb stick and press left and right to select cards and pressing up uses a card and pressing down discards a card. Which you should probably avoid discarding cards at all cost because you are very limited by your deck size on how many cards you can use. Too many times I lost a race because I was out of cards and could not catch up to the opposing racer.
The creature summons are annoying and they add another level of control to manage while racing. So not only do you have to read about cards while waiting for scrolling text but you also have to attack targets with your summoned creature, and steer your motorcycle. On top of this a lot of time if you are first the only target to shoot is behind you and there is no rear view mirror so you have to look behind you and shoot at them. Doing this while not hitting a wall is exceptionally hard. Overall I think the fact that you have to control the summoned creature yourself while micromanaging cards and driving becomes a little too much and really takes away from the experience.
Wheelie Breakers does support multiplayer up to 4 players and can be a very fun split screen experience but the AI is very difficult and is able to steer, shoot behind them at me, and play cards all at the same time. This can make this game frustratingly hard early on and can really make a person want to put the game down for awhile before attempting a race again.
Final Verdict
Overall Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Wheelie Breakers is an OK game. The amount of multi-tasking you need to do will make you wish you had at least 2 extra hands. I think for many people this game will be frustrating to play more then anything.
Score
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