Lead the Meerkats (Wii)

When WiiWare began, it did so with promise. Titles from talented indie devs like World of Goo and big companies developing for the service such as Capcom, Konami, and Nintendo itself all made this download service look pretty good, but with time, most of those developers moved on to better things and WiiWare became a polluted landscape that sort of matched the state of the rest of the Wii’s enormous library. When you’d see which new games were added to the Wii Shop each week, you’d often find some no name title that looked like a waste of Wii Points, and one day, when my brother and I did such a thing, Lead the Meerkats stood out to us as the pinnacle of WiiWare’s decline. Such an incredibly niche title with a such a strange premise put us off, but the jokes we told about Lead the Meerkats made it stick in my head until one day I decided to finally see if it was indeed the prototypical bad WiiWare title. The strangest thing about me doing so is… I feel like I’ve walked away from it having my first impression neither confirmed or denied, with the game at times feeling just as bad as suspected but at other times not as bad as it could have been.

 

Lead the Meerkats has been billed as both a simulation and a real-time strategy game, but I feel those genre titles are a bit too strong to describe what is going on in this game. It at least starts with a pretty cute way of explaining why you’re just a single female meerkat looking to build a pack from the ground up. Originally you were a member of a large meerkat colony, but a group of rival meerkats attacked and scattered your pack to the winds, the female you take control of lost on her own but looking to establish a new family, one large enough to reclaim the lands taken from her. Her method of doing this mainly seems to be digging tons and tons of burrows all around the map, gradually working her way from one to another until she reaches a checkpoint burrow that she will be able to come out of the next morning to continue the cycle. You never get to see underground and never go out at night, so most of what you’ll be seeing is some pretty drab savannah with a bunch of dirt shifting around as your meerkats dig underground. Burrowing is the biggest and most important mechanic, the game tracking your progress mainly by how many main holes you’ve captured. Sadly, digging is mostly an experience that fills time. There’s not much too it and it will complete automatically even if you don’t do the Wii Remote shaking it encourages. It is fairly shallow, but there is that generic level of enjoyment of gradually seeing your subterranean empire expand, the game at least tapping into that appeal well enough.

There are a few other things to do thankfully, but none of them are very well fleshed out. To make more meerkats involves hunting down bugs, a very simple attack and carry back to the burrow procedure that again seems to mostly fill time. Once you’ve hit 100% on a meter, a pup will be born the next morning, and a few days later, it’s an adult. While it is a puppy though, it needs to be kept safe… which is incredibly easy, you just station an adult meerkat to guard it for the day and its safe from all harm. It’s not like you’ll be needing that meerkat in the field anyway, as your hunting party can only go up to 9 meerkats and your population grows pretty easily. The pups are almost a non-factor because of this, although it is a nice touch that you can name each and every meerkat… although individuality is basically nonexistent.

 

Every meerkat in the pack is equally capable, obedient, and bland. Besides the main meerkat who you control, the others follow around mindlessly and do as they’re told, although sometimes they can struggle with the instructions. Meerkats have quite a few pathing problems when trying to get to their goals, but the game is merciful and will just teleport them there eventually so the task still gets done. Sometimes though, a meerkat may just jump out of bounds, refusing to come back, but there’s no penalty or risk in leaving them behind as they’ll be back at the burrow tomorrow morning. It would have been nice if there was some individuality to the meerkats, some ranks or roles so that you can actually develop an attachment to your group of meerkats. Instead, they robotically carry out tasks, and if you think that death may evoke an emotional response still, you’d be surprised just how safe all your meerkats are from any threat.

There are creatures prowling around the Savannah that will prey on your pack, but for some reason, the meerkats are perfectly capable of retaliating against all of them. Creatures like cobras and jackals will sometimes appear and harass your meerkats, but if they land a blow, they only knock out the meerkat they hit, the meerkat surviving as long as you get their unconscious body to a burrow before nightfall. All you have to do to defeat the attacker is turn the rest of the pack on the predator and shake your Wii Remote and nunchuck furiously and eventually you’ll win the fight. I can almost buy the meerkats turning their numbers against these types of predators, but then large eagles dip down to snatch meerkats and just linger around for twenty seconds so you can save the captured critter. Through the whole course of the game, I only lost three meerkats, mostly from moments I got lazy, and they were replaced so easily with growing pups that it hardly effected the pack as a whole. The game seems hesitant to impede the player in any meaningful way, with death so uncommon and easy to recover from that it holds no weight. At least the eagle should have been an instant death for one of your pack members, and it’s not like it would be a completely unavoidable death either as you can already order your pack to hide in a burrow in an instant. In the second half of the game things almost look like they’re going to get interesting as you push onto the rival pack’s territory to reclaim your homeland, but the other meerkats are bigger pushovers than the predators! As long as you’re fighting near one of your burrows, the meerkats on your side who get hurt too much in the conflict won’t die and can be immediately called back into battle after their retreat, so the war with the rivals just ends up being gradually wearing down their numbers since they can’t recover as easily. In the end, the biggest obstacle the game has to your progress is a glitch where it will slow down and eventually freeze, making you lose at most an in-game day’s progress.

 

So far most everything said about this game has been harsh, but when executed in game, it mostly ends up dull rather than egregiously bad. Sure, fighting against predators is too easy and the core focus of making burrows isn’t too interactive, but the gradual progress in conquering your corner of the Savannah and pumping out more pups provides a basic level of satisfaction. The game does have an end (although you can continue growing the pack after the credits), but really, the structure is both what hurts it and keeps it from being worse. You are always working towards clearly defined goals, but your freedom in approaching that task is minimal. It has the basic idea of a meerkat simulation down, but it doesn’t have any of the depth or flair to make that more interesting.

THE VERDICT: Lead the Meerkats is a missed opportunity. The parts it does emulate of meerkat life are the least interesting aspects, with the gameplay execution of them very dry as well. It fails to make you feel like you’re in control of a bunch of weak little mammals, making every task they execute far too easy and their enemies surprisingly surmountable. The game structure and ease of completion does ensure the game has a dull thrill to it, but most everything else, while not being frustrating or disgusting, still fails to create a very compelling experience.

 

And so, I give Lead the Meerkats for Wii…

A BAD rating. There was once an Animal Planet show called Meerkat Manor that showed that the lives of meerkats can have plenty of drama and intrigue despite their innocuous appearance, but none of that seems to be in Lead the Meerkats. The aspects of meerkat life that are represented here are transitioned into bare-bones game mechanics and any element that could have mixed things up or lead to memorable moments of peril or triumph are stripped down to be things you don’t even have to worry about. Every meerkat in the pack is an interchangeable unit in a greater burrowing machine, and while mechanical triumph is enjoyable in a basic way, this game could have been so much more. Lead the Meerkats should have either tightened its structure or made it more free form, both having potential benefits to its simulation angle. A stronger structure can lead to scripted moments where things could be challenging or interesting, and a more free form approach can lead to stories evolving out of mechanics interacting in meaningful and unexpected ways. Instead, everything goes about as you plan it with brief interruptions that can be dealt with too easily. Giving actual roles, skills, and personalities to the meerkats could have added a needed extra layer so that task completion isn’t a completely thoughtless affair, but I fear that maybe the budget wasn’t quite there to make the kind of meerkat game that could have turned heads instead of invited dismissal.

 

Lead the Meerkats avoids being the poster child for bad WiiWare games just barely, mainly because it is like a rickety bridge: its elements are weak, but it will hold. There are worse titles on WiiWare that completely fail to capture their intended feel, but Lead the Meerkats merely comes up short in its department. While researching this game though I did discover there is quite an avid meerkat appreciation community online that is fond of this game, so if all you need is a meerkat game, it will put in a serviceable performance, but it could have been a lot more, and those meerkat fans deserve the game this could have been rather than the subpar one they’ve settled for.