Elebits is a game of hide and seek with an anti-gravity gun. Elebits are some sort of creature which came to Earth during a lightning storm and have suddenly gone crazy.  The town is going through a black out of sorts, and you decide to grab your Dad’s handy “Capture Gun” and zap the Elebits.  Each Elebit you collect counts toward the wattage total of the level you are playing on.  The more you collect, the more appliances start to power up. The appliances hold special elebits which increase the power of your capture gun, allowing you to pick up heavier objects.  Each level has a time limit and a wattage total to fulfill before moving on to the next area.  It plays like a Katamari-shooter hybrid, but it lacks Katamari’s charm and quite frankly has the worst story and voice acting I’ve heard in a long time. But that’s not what the game is really about anyway.

Elebits tries really hard to be a good game, but falls short. The aim is absolutely perfect down to the pixel, and you’ll be able to pick off Elebits from a distance with ease. Your character is controlled by the nunchuck thumstick with the C and Z buttons used to stretch and duck respectively.  The physics of the objects are very impressive, if a bit “floaty” as well. Each object can be picked up and gently rotated and placed carefully or hurled across the screen.  Twisting faucets on and off, opening doors and sliding cabinets are hit and miss.

But for all the things it does right, Elebits does 2 or three things wrong that really drag down the game. About 4 stages in, new rules and restrictions begin to come down such as “Don’t break too many objects” or “Don’t make too much noise”.  This is an obvious attempt to change up the game play and give the game some strategy, but it does nothing but detract from the fun.  The game also suffers serious slow down when you finally get your gun strong enough to throw around big objects.  As you progress in the game and the stages get larger, the graphics get worse and the slowdown becomes more frequent.  The game is also extremely easy, although you won’t be able to finish every level on your first shot thanks to the silly rules and Black Elebits which zap your life.

Multiplayer is a mess. It just gets too chaotic with more than one person tearing apart the environment. We found ourselves stuck “inside” objects way too often and struggled to figure out how to lift the house or truck or cabinet off our heads.  Elebits also allows you to edit rooms and trade them via Connect24, but I wasn’t able to test that out.

If this title were given longer in development and not rushed out to meet launch, it could have been a great game. All the elements are there, but the execution is sloppy and seems thrown together.  Elebits is worth a rental at best as you’ll tear through the game in 4 or 5 hours tops.

5.5/10

Mahalo,

Duke