Wii User Reviews

A fun point and click puzzler with a cartoonish exterior that belies the games stern challenge, this is one of the Nintendo Wii’s hidden gems.

It's really a shame how under the radar this game is. From it's cartoony Saturday morning theme story, to it's clever puzzles, and it's stylish look, Zack and Wiki is easily one of the best puzzle games on the wii.Zack and Wiki goes for a more point and click style of adventure game, opting the wii mote as it's closest counterpart, remotes. While the game does have a child like nature and wonder, the puzzles themselves are far more challenging than they appear, often asking a lot of forethought about the actions you take before and after. While a hint system certainly is there, their are just some clues that are a little more obtuse or confusing in terms of how to interact, but these moments are usually few and far between. On top of this, each puzzle has a certain amount of points to collect, often given the full amount when you are able to do puzzles fast enough and not make too many mistakes. This in turn helps provide for some fairly interesting replay value as the game also has secret treasures to find on each map and collect, making you think extra hard on top of the usual puzzles.While you won't find a lot of action in Zack and Wiki, the humor, art style , and puzzles are more than enough to burn this charm game into your heart.

This game simply doesn't respect the players time, having to restart entire levels doesn't make the puzzles more challenging it just makes them more monotonous. The controls are slow, picking up "new" items or interacting with "new" objects after you die takes too much time introducing the item again and again. Walking around is tedious with trying to click everywhere and slow movement. Fast reaction speed is randomly required and interactions aren't well telegraphed making for cheap deaths. I just got to the lava world and I quit after 5hours+ of pain. If the game had checkpoints/infinite revives I could look past most of it. I have no clue who thought this was a good gameplay mechanic to force the player to repeat the same steps over and over again that provide zero challenge after you solve them for the first time. It's like the developer got puzzle games and action games confused. There's definitely a good game here if it were ever to be remastered with some additional gameplay polish.

Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros's Treasure is a charming and inventive puzzle game, although it does have some slightly annoying controls. While the game's concept and puzzles are engaging, the motion controls can be imprecise at times, leading to frustration during critical moments. The game heavily relies on motion gestures for interactions, which can occasionally feel unresponsive or require overly specific movements. Despite this minor drawback, the clever puzzle design and intriguing gameplay mechanics shine through, making Zack and Wiki a worthwhile experience for puzzle enthusiasts. One of the game's strongest aspects is its amazing and challenging puzzle design. Each level presents players with intricate and clever puzzles that require logical thinking, observation, and experimentation to solve. The game encourages players to think outside the box and discover innovative solutions, rewarding creativity and critical thinking. The puzzles become progressively more complex and require players to utilize various items and abilities, adding depth and excitement to the gameplay. Zack and Wiki successfully strikes a balance between providing satisfying "Aha!" moments and maintaining a steady challenge, making each puzzle completion feel immensely rewarding. Zack and Wiki's art style has its highs and lows. On the positive side, the game's vibrant and colorful visuals create a whimsical and delightful world to explore. The character designs are charming and memorable, while the environments are beautifully detailed and evoke a sense of adventure. However, some players may find the graphical quality and character animations to be a bit lacking compared to contemporary titles. Additionally, the game's fixed camera perspective can occasionally hinder visibility and make precise movements more difficult. Despite these drawbacks, the overall art style of Zack and Wiki contributes to its unique charm and reinforces the game's lighthearted and adventurous tone.

Uno de los juegos más infravalorados del catalogo de Wii y que sabia aprovechar al máximo todas funciones del Wii Mote. De los mejores puzles que he visto en un videojuego, y con un potencial para una secuela que por desgracia nunca llego... Personajes carismáticos y situaciones muy cómicas, pero sobre todo cuando acabes el juego será inevitable sentirse triste. Una experiencia muy satisfactoria, única y con muchísima personalidad que no creo que encuentres en otro juego similar.

Zack & Wiki didn't sell very well and it's fairly unlikely that there'll ever be a sequel and that's a shame because it's a great game. First the game looks great for a 2007 Wii game with a very nice cartoon art style and animations, sure it's helped by the genre with small levels but it still took some nice developing skills at the time, specially given the fact that the game runs smoothly. But the most important thing is the gameplay and here it's really sweet with well thought puzzles, but always logical (you don't need to click on everything to find out the solution by luck), there's also a very good, natural and varied use of the motion controls. Point and click never seemed so active. Finally the story is very predictable, with very few dialogs and it's probably the worst part of the game, it will take something around 15 hours to finish game, far from the lying cover that guarantees 40 hours (a shame, specially that 15 hours is very honest for the genre). So in conclusion Zack and Wiki is a very good game if you want to put your brain to the test, the only better option I see is the Portal games (for the incredibly funny dialogs) and they're not available on Wii, so if you want a puzzle game and own this console go for it, just don't believe the cover, it's a big lie.

Don't be fooled by the infantile presentation. When you start this game, you'll feel like you've made a mistake by buying a game for babies. But the puzzles get really difficult really fast, and this game has some of the most clever puzzles I've seen. There's a level where you have to examine a lock and make a key of that shape... out of ice! If you stick with this game you'll find the characters to be likable and the overall experience very satisfying.

If you have a Wii or Wii U, this is a must have! This is the Wii-remote fully utilized. One of my absolute favorites! Pros: + Very Clever Puzzles + Wii-remote FULLY utilized + fun and memorable characters + superb level designs + tons of collectables + humorous + fully replayable Con: - not for the easily puzzled :P

The worst game I've ever played. I play video games to have fun and this "game" was the complete opposite of fun. I never once enjoyed playing it. It looks like a charming kids game with an anime style reminiscent of One Piece, but in actuality this game is aimed at older, more hardcore gamers. Each level is a giant puzzle, and it all looks very engaging at first. But when you dig into the game all it does is make you angry that it was even made. Let's start with the controls, they're awful. First off you move around by pointing and clicking where you want to go and the objects you want to interact with on the screen. It's not an enjoyable method and all I could do was wish they would have let me use the nunchuck. In order to complete puzzles you have to deal with the games awful use of the Wii's motion controls. To keep it simple the motion controls are awkward and can be erratic in responsiveness. Now for the actual "gameplay". Completing levels is simple and mostly boring at first but quickly ramp up in difficulty and can be controller smashingly frustrating. This is mostly do to the horrible design choices that make the game feel like on big trial and error scenario. Puzzle games always require you to experiment with many wrong ideas before you can determine how a puzzle can be completed, but the problem with this is that the game punishes you for this. Mess up and you will quickly die and get sent back to the beginning of the level, or worse not die and just render the level un-winnable. This is especially frustrating if you've almost made your way through a level as a simple mistake will cause you to lose all your progress. There are ways to prevent having to restart a level in the form of tickets that can revive you shortly before you die, but even these are rendered useless in the later levels. For instance you've almost made your way through a level but didn't do one little thing at the beginning of the level and got yourself killed, the ticket is made useless and you'll have to restart the level anyway. In the later levels which are bigger, longer, and more complex, an simple mistake can mean redoing up to 30 minutes of progress. It's angering, heck the whole game seems like it's just a way to piss of gamers. Do yourself a favor and avoid this game. I take my reviews very seriously and the fact that I'm giving this a zero means you probably want to take my advice and make sure this game NEVER finds it's way anywhere near you or the people you care about. Unless of course you just like getting angry and playing garbage video games.

This game is so much fun, and it's an utter travesty that it does not have as much recognition as games like Super Mario Galaxy or Metroid Prime 3, as it stands right with them as some of the best games on the Wii. Full of absolutely amazing puzzles (seriously; some of the best in gaming), a very nice art style, great music and by far the best use of the Wii remote, Zack and Wiki is an adventure classic.

Zack and Wiki is one of the few "point-and-click- adventure games a la the early 1990s that has been released on a console. It would be a superb game if not for multiple annoyances that drastically detract from the overall experience. The graphics, sounds, and most importantly the puzzles are excellent. The puzzles hit the sweet spot of not being too easy or too esoteric, and most veteran adventure game players should get by without needing any hints whatsoever. However Zack and Wiki suffers from 3 huge problems that bring down the score: 1. Story - A non-existent story is not a problem in a game that does note contain emotive characters, but Zack and Wiki is full of colorful characters, lengthy cut scenes, villains, danger and intrigue. Yet nothing is done to advance the characters beyond blasse anime tropes. Either flesh out the characters, or just place the puzzles in disconnected rooms with a faceless protagonist and cut out the rest of the garbage. 2. Death, saving, and dead ends - Dying in adventure games pretty well expired with the Space Quest series, and it hasn't been missed. But even in those games, while death was annoying the ability to save at any point meant it was only a setback of a few minutes of time. Dead ends, a situation where the game becomes impossible because a critical item was destroyed, has also been eliminated from modern adventure games and for good reason. Zack and Wiki tragically suffers from 2 problems: Puzzles that contain dead-ends (fortunately not many) and puzzles where death can occur suddenly, without warning, and without the ability to save. You can buy 'platinum tickets' which will revive you moments before death, but these cost money, and worse, the price of each successive ticket increases exponentially. I was very frugal with my tickets and I still ended up using a lot of them toward the later levels. Having to repeat 20-30 steps to get to the point where I died is inexcusable in a modern video game. 3. Wii-mote usage. This is strangely one of the most praised features of the game yet is a big drawback. Items are used by waggling the Wiimote in the same manner as the item in question. The only problem is in many instances you simply cannot get the item to behave how you want it to. This is infuriating in time sensitive puzzles especially when they case death (see point #1). Since the actual usage of the item is generally straight forward, making us use the motion controls adds nothing to the game except frustration. The above 3 points should not take away from the actual level design, which is fantastic. It is tragic that such well crafted levels had to be shackled inside such awful restraints.

The puzzles are truly fun and make the game worthy of much of its praise but I think most reviewers are ignoring all the incredibly annoying garbage between puzzles. This game also has the longest and most useless intro to any game I've played on the Wii. I also think the puzzles go from too easy to too hard a little too quickly.