Remember Pilot Wings? We bet you do. But if you don’t, all you need to know is that we’re talking about a classic SNES and N64 game that let you take to the air in a number of challenges and missions – one that is well-known and has its very own fan base. This isn’t Pilot Wings, even though you’ll likely be reminded of the well-regarded Nintendo flyer if you ever play it. We know we were when we first played Wing Island at E3 2006, where it first debuted. And we know we were reminded of it again when we played the final game for review.

Pilot Wings as a Wii game makes sense, even though at this time no such game has been announced. Even Wing Island, on paper, sounds interesting enough and makes sense. The goal is as simple and innocent as they come. The star of the game is a sparrow named Sparrow Wing Jr. Your job is to take control of the bird-kid, who flies airplanes and runs a handyman business passed down from his grandfather.

Wing Island is made up of missions in which you must complete a specified objective. Each mission you’re tasked with opens with a cut-scene, explaining what’s going on. There’s no voice work, but that’s probably a good thing. Every bit of information is delivered through written dialogue, all of which is aimed at a young audience or at least appears to be.

These cut-scenes, unfortunately, are pretty subpar. Much like many of the recent Wii games we’ve played, they’re told via a storyboard, meaning you’re presented with a character on screen and a bubble on screen with text in it, which represents what that character is saying. The setup is pretty primitive, and it detracts from the overall experience, making Wing Island feel like it had a low budget. Regardless, the story here isn’t incredibly exciting and it fails to entertain for more than a few seconds.

Beyond the lame storytelling method, gameplay itself feels equally rushed. Strangely enough, control is both Wing Island’s greatest achievement and biggest downfall. Hudson’s flying game takes advantage of the Wii-mote’s motion-sensing capabilities, and thus the game is controlled mostly through motioning and moving the controller in the air. Pointing the remote downwards moves your plane downwards, leaning it to the left moves it to the left, moving it to the right moves your plane to the right and pointing it upwards steers it upwards. Unfortunately, this control scheme proves far too uncomfortable in execution. One would imagine using the Wii-mote like joystick in a flying game and having the control scheme work adequately, but not Hudson. The team came up with an alternative design and it proves to be far too unpolished and clumsy instead.

Even the button layout – pressing up on the D-pad and down on it to speed up and slow down, respectively, for example – is poor. When flying in formation with multiple planes at your control, it’s required that you change formation often (depending on if you want to be able to fly fast or turn more easily, you’ll need to change), but even doing this is too difficult due to awkward design. The control scheme is far too complicated, and it directly contradicts what would otherwise be a simple approach to controls. Isn’t the whole point of the Wii remote to make things simpler and more intuitive? Wing Island’s control scheme, overall, doesn’t do either of these things.

Controlling planes in Wing Island means having to suffer through some awkward hand movements and gestures, but other than that, the control is actually pretty responsive. In fact, it’s even a little fun controlling airplanes with the Wii-mote. However, while the actual motion controls are responsive, the rest of the configuration only subtracts from the experience.


Mission objectives are always basic and easy to grasp – not necessarily a bad thing. Some missions require you to pick up objects, others to drop them off. One mission in the game challenges you to fly over some burning crops and extinguish the flames that engulf them. However, every mission takes place over landscapes that are devoid of any artistic quality, which means you’ll be sick of the sights in no time.

This reality is magnified in part due to what are some seriously low-detail environments in the game. Textures are as bland as they come, looking like something you’d expect from an early PlayStation 2 title. All in all, this isn’t a good looking game. In fact, it’s one of the Wii’s worst looking games, so far. It has a fairly clean look to it, but it’s so plain. Surprisingly, Hudson’s game does run in 16:9 and 480p, though, which we have to give thanks for.


Wing Island supports multiplayer with several different head-to-head modes. One Wii-mote is required for each player, but interestingly enough, the game allows two to play with one using a Wii-mote and another using the nunchuck. We don’t recommend playing this way, as you have to sit extremely close to one another, and it’s somewhat of a hassle, but we were surprised by just how well the control works with the nunchuck. Ultimately, it’s somewhat of a gimmicky design choice, however.

Wing Island comes off as barebones and rushed – a product that only children could enjoy, and we’re not even convinced about that statement. There just isn’t much to the game. It’s flying around in circles – in some pretty boring levels. Over and over and over. We want to like the game. It’s innocent, in a way, and we certainly can’t “hate” it.


Usually, we don’t take a game’s price into consideration in the process of reviewing software. However, with titles like this one, we can’t help but wonder what the hell is going on at the game’s publisher, Konami. The title’s priced at $39.99, 10 dollars under the traditional price of Wii software, but it’s still horribly overpriced. Maybe we would be able to say “this is a fun game and might be worth playing around with” if it was 10 bucks, but at its current price, we simply can’t recommend anything but to not bother with it.