Attack of the Movies 3D (Wii)

3D movies rise and fall in popularity in cycles, with the mid-2000s being perhaps the point they were taken the most seriously thanks to IMAX’s track record of immersive experiences and movies like Avatar showing it can enhance an experience rather than simply play host to cheap thrills. Before then though, 3D was often the domain of B-movies, cheap horror and monster flicks resorting to it to add an extra appeal to their often corny concepts. Looking at the cover art of the 2010 Wii game Attack of the Movies 3D it certainly seems to be hearkening back to this era of films, but while it replicates the unnecessary 3D gimmickry of its inspirations, the actual gameplay feels less inspired by the B-movies of the past and more just the most generic replications of stage concepts that have appeared in arcade light gun shooters many times before.

Attack of the Movies 3D features a selection of six fairly short levels that are all meant to be different films you’re entering to shoot down whatever enemies happen to be that film’s focus. While you can certainly trace the first stage’s invasion of giant insects to B-movie roots and the Robot Rebellion level is definitely meant to imitate the dark future of the Terminator film franchise, Into The Emperor’s Tomb is a mishmash of generic temple iconography in the same way Cosmic Combat is a bland space battle. Deep Sea Danger and Graveyard Gunfight are the least connected to this theme because while the other four at least seem to connect to some design tropes of low quality monster movies, it’s hard to imagine a movie based on a submarine blasting apart sharks or someone traveling through a graveyard and shooting apart skeletons. It seems more like a set of disconnected stage ideas were concocted and thrown together for the rail shooting action, the player automatically moving through these stages and shooting anything aggressive that appears on screen.

The game can be played in a 2D mode if you weren’t able to get the 4 included pairs of 3D glasses with the game, but even if you select the 3D mode, the game doesn’t look much different. You’ll see a bit of a fuzzy outline to objects that are meant to pop so it seems a half-hearted effort to only have the moving objects and enemies appear to emerge rather than truly adding depth to these stages, but even when viewed in 3D it’s not too impressive to see a skeleton or giant wasp appear to be slightly closer than the other objects on screen. The fact this is game where you need to point your Wii remote at the screen to shoot at targets likely meant the minimal amount of 3D was necessary to avoid issues with actually targeting the enemies, but the game still has plenty of issues with its shooting mechanics that are surprisingly at its strongest in the game’s first stage.

Before you can play a new film you need to beat the one prior, so when you begin playing Attack of the Movies 3D, your only choice is Insect Invasion. In this level where giant bugs are invading a city, you’ll soon begin to see plenty of the problems with the game’s approach to designing levels. Since all of the forward movement and your viewpoint is controlled by the game, you can’t shoot at something that’s off-screen or, oddly enough, on the edges of it, and in this level there are blue ants that shoot green goo balls at you. Not only might these ants be lingering on the edges of the screen while opening fire, but the goo balls can come in from angles where you can’t realistically shoot them down because your cursor can’t reach that area. Shooting down the goo balls will spare you damage, but expect to take a lot of cheap hits as the automatic movement prevents you from protecting yourself. This stage also features large wasps that can shoot stingers that are hard to pinpoint in the brief second you have to shoot them down, but an even odder issue arose once when a wasp flew towards the screen. Some enemies will appear up close and start striking if you don’t kill them quickly enough, but this particular wasp continuously jabbed the screen for free damage since all of my shots were passing right through it. It seems the game eventually realized it accidentally produced an unkillable bug and had it disappear suddenly, but between this and the screen’s issue with showing what you need to shot down to stay safe, it’s odd they put this level first, especially since few other levels ever have similar issues.

Instead, when you’re flying through space, exploring a temple, or fighting your way through a graveyard, you’ll often find the opposition is far too simple and easy to worry about. Some might have something similar to the blue ant advantage of firing before they’re even really on screen such as the turrets in space, but you can see where they will appear sometimes and open fire before they potentially move out of view. The faces on the temple walls that spit at you can sometimes have the off-screen problem too but are much calmer so the damage doesn’t rack up as much, and health items can be fairly abundant to offset the moments where damage feels inevitable unless you know what to expect already. The levels are short enough to be replayed but they aren’t interesting to return to as your participation mostly boils down to firing at things until they die with little concern for strategy or self-preservation. While the aesthetic of your generic weapons fire change like firing lasers in space or torpedoes underwater, there are only two true alterations to how you can fire upon the opposition. Weapon pick-ups include a machine gun that shoots in a rapid burst and a different automatic weapon that allows you to fire continuously, the two guns having limited ammo but often being plentiful pick-ups so little hesitation is needed when it comes to mowing down the opposition. Even the boss monsters like the city’s giant scorpion or the ocean’s Kraken are pushovers when you have one of these weapons, and in some slower levels like the underwater stage things can feel like they’re puttering along without throwing enough at you to keep you engaged.

It’s pretty easy to complete all the game has to offer in one sitting since each movie level is less than ten minutes and only hard when things go awry like the blue ant placement, but even if you try to think of this as a shooting gallery you’ll retry to earn more points, the targets aren’t that interesting. Many enemies will move into place and then attack until they’re dealt with, the automatics trivialize many encounters, and the moments where it might be hard to shoot something are when the screens moving too quick to open fire on everything you might wish to target. For the most part there is very little in the way of optional things to shoot for more points or goodies, although the graveyard level that serves as the final unlockable movie indulges in scenery that you can shoot a bit. Bringing more people in for four player co-op feels like an experience that won’t really challenge anyone save the most inexperienced players, and they’ll likely be turned off by the repetitive nature of each stage or the outright glitches. While you can still say that pointing and shooting might still have a tiny bit of inherent appeal that takes more than unimaginative levels to truly erase, Attack of the Movies 3D really doesn’t make a case for why you should play it when it’s so clear this was slapped together quickly and without much passion.

THE VERDICT: While the basic 3D that Attack of the Movies 3D promises was always bound to be a bit unexciting, it’s surprising how little else there is to its on-rails shooter levels to try and make up for the underwhelming gimmick. When it’s not having issues with glitches or off-screen enemies hurting you when you have no recourse, Attack of the Movies 3D is whipping out stages that grow boring swiftly and provide the automatic weapons too often to even worry about the stage bosses being a threat. Even if it did work properly at all times it would be a shallow light gun shooter that does nothing to iterate on the basic idea of shooting enemies on screen, this supposed tribute to 3D B-movies instead an insult to a genre of film that was already not so hot itself.

And so, I give Attack of the Movies 3D for Wii…

A TERRIBLE rating. Attack of the Movies 3D is probably at its best when you’re in a very boring and easy level like Deep Sea Danger where you can sit back and easily shoot everything while it fails to put up a decent fight. When the game does try to make foes a threat, it ends up having issues like the off-screen blue ants and the only real danger of a death occurring comes from the fact that sometimes you just can’t target certain foes. The 3D doesn’t seem to be the culprit in making for such imprecise moments and the level designs incongruous with your capabilities, but even if it did work properly at all times, it doesn’t have any really ideas on how to hook the player. The unimpressive 3D can be dismissed as a failed gimmick, but if shooting things in your shooting game isn’t managing to be interesting and only gives that most basic of positive feedback in seeing a monster die when you’ve pointed at it and fired, it’s hard to find anything else that could salvage the experience. A host of changes would need to be made to make this entertaining, the weapon balance one thing that could be retooled or expanded so bosses aren’t trivialized and the special guns could have more utility than firing more bullets more quickly. Adding extra considerations to a level could do a lot to deepen the experience too, but there are no branching paths, barely any interactive background elements, and most enemies can be shot wherever for damage even when bosses feel like they should have weak points. Not only are all of the game’s film universes generic to the point they feel disingenuous, but the shooting gameplay feels like it only has the absolute baseline of features required to be a light gun game that isn’t completely devoid of substance.

Nintendo’s 3DS handheld system would release about a year after Attack of the Movies 3D was released, so when even a console was chasing the 3D trend it’s hard to fault this Wii title for trying to draw extra attention to itself by including the feature. What is much easier to chastise is its uninspired level design and the flaws in it shooting mechanics that have no right existing in something so straightforward. With even the box art featuring a praying mantis that never shows up in game, it’s made abundantly clear that this messy rail shooter was just thrown together with little thought or care, this game neither a tribute to the old fashioned 3D movies nor an attempt to provide a legitimately entertaining light gun shooter.