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Written by Peter on Monday 21 Nov 2011
It’s surprising it took this long for a game like Go Vacation to come out for the Wii, but I’m glad it finally has. At last a third party studio, Namco Bandai in this case, has created a game that is aimed squarely at the Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort market with a budget somewhere near what Nintendo puts into their family games. The result is a mini-game collection with impressive scope, a lot of content and superb packaging holding all the activities together.
Go Vacation captures the feel of being on a holiday and allows you to explore the resorts at your own leisure, taking part in activities along the way. You start off at the Marine Resort, where you can race marine bikes, snorkel or do tricks on an ATV. The game guides you to take part in all the sports by requiring you to play each once to collect a rubber stamp. To play a sport you must first navigate to where it takes place. Usually you have some mode of transport, but you can also choose to walk. However, walking is not a very effective option unless you have a lot of time on your hands – the resorts are huge.
Fortunately the transport options provided (from things like skateboards and marine bikes to horses and kayaks) speed things up. As you go from sport to sport there is quite a lot to see, from waterfalls to lakes to other holiday-makers standing around chatting. The atmosphere is tranquil and I even enjoyed taking pleasure-cruises around the resorts from time to time. In this way it reminded me of Animal Crossing where just being in the resort is fun, and there is a lot more that Namco Bandai could do in this area.
Great variety, limited depth
The sports themselves are mostly very well implemented, albeit limited in scope. There is a huge variety too. There are four different resorts with different themes: marine, mountain, city and snow. The marine park has surfing, volleyball and snorkeling, among many others. The city park contains sports like skateboarding (in a few different flavours from tricks to grinding for a distance), car-racing (reminiscent of Ridge Racer in feel, although simpler), and a dancing and music game, with a bunch more. The snow resort has sports like skiing (slalom, jumping and trick events), snowboarding and snowmobile riding. The mountain park has tennis, kayaking, horse-riding and various shooting events. Even just playing through all the nearly 50 sports to get your stamps will take five hours or more, and that’s without replaying events or trying the various options in each.
Most sports have a number of variations, levels or stages. For example, the racing events usually have a set of stages which take place on different tracks and get progressively more difficult (although the difficulty level in general is very low in the game). Most sport variations can be played in singleplayer or multiplayer, although a few are singleplayer only or multiplayer only.
Exploration and sightseeing are fun in themselves
The graphics in Go Vacation are particularly noteworthy, because each resort is a huge area and you can go just about anywhere and see terrain and buildings that are far off. The style is relatively simple but the scale of things as well as the beautiful water makes this a very attractive-looking game. For example, if you’re at the top of the mountain or flying in a paraglider in the Mountain Resort you can always see the resort’s lake, or as you go up the ski-lifts in real-time to the top of each slope you can see far into the distance and see the Ski Resort at the bottom of the slopes.
It’s enjoyable just searching for great viewing spots to see the well-designed parks. There are caves and other landscape features that are only there to be looked at, which is surprising and very welcome. You don’t have to do the surfing activity to go out into the surf and get up on your board, you can just go and do things as you explore and enjoy the resorts. Of course, in the events themselves things are a little more structured, but you can always just make a course up with your friends instead of entering the horse-riding event. Skiing down the slopes or kayaking down the river is also a lot of fun without an actual event to control it. Kayaking is a fun activity, but just kayaking down the river in explore mode offers much entertainment on its own.
Go Vacation is very clearly designed for families. Each player (up to four) can create an avatar, which can be a child, a teen or an adult. Once each player chooses an avatar (or a Mii) you can all go off exploring the resort of your choice (once they’re unlocked, which requires collecting a few stamps) with your own portion of the screen. When one person finds an activity they want to do and select to do it everyone joins that person in the activity. You can choose to all go around together or simply explore on your own, but activities are all done together. There are no load screens as you explore (unless you change resorts), but when starting an activity and returning to the “overworld” there are mildly annoying load screens. You can also choose to access activities directly from the menu, but unless there was a particular activity I wanted to do I preferred to just explore and take part in whatever I came across.
The controls are intuitive and follow the same schemes for the most part, no matter what activity you’re doing. Steering is usually done by rotating the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. The B button accelerates and the Z button brakes. Tricks are performed using the Nunchuk analog stick, the Wii Remote’s D-pad as well as maneuvers of the Remote and Nunchuk together. Controls are made to fit the vehicle, so when walking the analog stick controls your movement and when riding on horseback a flick of the Remote and Nunchuk up and down gets the horse to speed up and pulling back on the analog stick brings the horse to a halt. There is support for the Wii Remote Plus (some events require it), and for the Wii Balance Board (mostly for the skiiing and skating events), which is very welcome. Some events use the Nunchuk and others don’t, so I do find myself connecting and disconnecting the device a lot, which can be annoying, but it’s understandable.
A family game for those not on holiday!
Go Vacation is a well put together family game – it’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into making this (rather unlike many of the other sports-themed mini-game collections that the Wii has been home to). There is a huge amount of content (I haven’t discussed your villa which you can customise, or your outfits, or photo-ops or treasure hunting), and while there is some repetition between activities (some of the racing events feel very similar to each other) there are a large number of unique ones too. I highly recommend Go Vacation for families looking for a game to play together, or for friends wanting to just mess around in a virtual holiday resort because they couldn’t get away to a real one.
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