Heathcliff: The Fast and the Furriest (Wii) review"License-based shovelware that ranks among the Wii's very worst offerings." |
I was free and clear, with relatively few bruises to show for the half-dozen years I spent playing Wii games. The high-definition Wii U has been on the market for over 12 months now, and the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are already last year’s news. I didn’t have any pressing reason to return to the hundreds of readily available titles from Nintendo’s previous console generation, but I did anyway. There are gems there that I’ve not yet experienced, I’m almost certain, and I’m determined to discover a few more of them before I put the little white box to bed. I just chose an awful place to start my search, and that awful place was Heathcliff: The Fast and the Furriest.
Heathcliff and I go way back. When I was a young lad, I used to watch the cartoon series on Nickelodeon whenever I visited my grandma’s house on weekdays (my parents were quite content without a television signal), and I even bought some of the books from the school book club. They were very simple and innocent, but I liked the artwork and the characters. So do a lot of other folks, even now. The cartoon apparently still runs in newspapers (now drawn by George Gately’s nephew) and there’s even occasional talk of a movie. I like the sound of that, but only if it turns out better than this botched Wii affair.
Perhaps the best thing about Heathcliff: The Fast and the Furriest is the title, a more clever play on “The Fast & The Furious” than the game deserves. Certainly, the story itself is nothing to write home about. The gist, as quickly told through a few panels arranged to resemble a comic, is that Heathcliff must race to save his feline lady friend Sonja—and presumably, the rest of the world—from an invading group of evil alien cats. That’s as good an excuse as any for Heathcliff and acquaintances to drive really quickly around a variety of cartoony tracks, but it also cuts one recurring character out of the action from the get-go and that’s not good when there are so few of them to start with. A limited roster is the least of the game’s problems, though.
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Staff review by Jason Venter (January 13, 2014)
Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words. |
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