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.
