A First Person Shooter available through Wiiware is not something anyone ever expected to see. On top of that, a First Person Shooter available through Wiiware with online play but no Deathmatch-style mode is something nobody could have ever expected to see anywhere.
Yet, here is Onslaught by Hudson, available for your 1,000 Wii Points and out of all of the unexpected elements that have come together to make this game, the most unexpected of all may be that it is actually worth the price.
Onslaught is a fairly straight forward First Person Shooter. It's just you and your two buddies alone on an alien world with giant, cyberneticaly enhanced insects that you must shoot and shoot and shoot until they stop moving or you do. To make sure the former happens instead of the latter you start off armed with four guns, a default semi-auto machine gun, a shotgun, a bazooka and a full-auto machine gun, as well as a laser whip device for melee combat and some hand grenades. Your default weapons are surprisingly effective against the massive hordes you'll be facing and ammo is plentiful as the enemy bugs will occasionally drop magazines that will stock up your reserves. If that wasn't enough, you can also find the occasional crate that will contain upgraded versions of your guns that you can equip between stages for more power and some levels are even kind enough to give you access to a heavily-armed transport vehicle.
The controls are smooth and responsive, the Wiimote functions perfectly responding to player input and allowing you to aim accurately or sweep lines of bullets back and forth across the waves of foes looking to snack on you. You can bring up your melee weapon or grenade with the appropriate button tap on the Nunchuck and let them fly with a small, responsive flick of the same. The most constant use of your Nunchuck will be for the ever present need to wipe away the acidic cyborg insect blood that splatters onto your visor, blocking your vision and causing damage if allowed to sit for too long. The transport vehicle can be slightly hard to steer and yet even then it is only hard in a way you would naturally expect a tank-like vehicle to be slightly unwieldy to turn and doesn’t detract from the experience.
Your two AI-controlled squad mates can assume one of three formations with a tap of the A button and, shockingly, they're fairly smart (or at least obedient) for AI controlled characters in an FPS. You won't have to worry about them charging off on their own to get killed or just standing there like morons when all you want them to do is stick close and occasionally fire their guns when it might be helpful. In Onslaught they stay in formation with you and will do their best to keep the cyborg insect hordes at bay from their angles and sometimes their shots are the best warning that there are enemies coming close behind you.
Graphically, the game is simplistic and yet pleasing to look at with vibrant colors and well-detailed (if small in variation) enemies coming at you from all angles. You only fight three bosses in the games but they are well constructed and can move with terrifying quickness for things so large, so you won't be able to waste much time admiring their details. You won't be able to waste much time on anything, really, as every stage is a lightning fast, frantic firefight. Of course, this speed makes the small 13 stages the game offers seem even smaller and the barebones story will not exactly come off as a deeply engrossing epic, so it is up to the multi-player modes to extend the game play.
It is here that Onslaught's most unique-for-an-FPS feature stands out. Online multiplayer is set-up where you join a group of four, pick a mission and then work your way through it, competing not by seeing how many times you can kill each other but by seeing how many points you can rack up shooting enemies. The missions adjust their spawn rate and toughness to match how many players are together and as a result you can find yourself in the middle of some incredibly harrowing and exhilarating shootouts with everyone firing every which way with no way to communicate with each other as you each try to take out as many targets as you can first. This will ensure you will constantly hear the jarringly loud and clear "OW!" that issues forth from the Wiimote whenever you're struck with a teammates' bullet but at the same time is an incredible amount of fun and runs smoothly despite the incredibly large number of moving objects on the screen at once.
Hudson caught everyone by surprise by releasing this gem to the Wiiware service and, as someone who is not normally a fan of First Person Shooters; I was caught by surprise by how much I enjoyed my time with Onslaught. If you have the Wiipoints to spare, give it a try. How much you have fun with it may be completely unexpected.
