You may or may not be aware that Nights: Journey of Dreams is inspired by a game that came out on the Saturn 10 years ago called NiGHTS. Some of you may think it’s a brand new idea and to be honest, I had never heard of it before. The original was like Sonic, only with your main character NiGHTS, who looks like a purple flying jester, flying round the levels, through rings, collecting blue orbs and circling bad guys instead of running over the land.
In this new version on the Wii you fly around the levels through rings, collecting blue orbs and circling around bad guys. You also get to do a bit of running around as a boy as a girl as you explore their dream world and try to rid it of the evil Nightmarens.
Controls are very simple, what Sega want you to do is point the remote at the screen and move a cursor round the screen in the direction you want Nights to fly. What you actually should do is use the Nunchuck controller to control him directly or better still, a GameCube controller as the remote on this game is absolutely useless. It’s like trying to write with your left hand if you’re right-handed. Use a normal controller, however, and you can control Nights a lot better and have at least some fun playing the game.
It looks 3d but the flying sections play a bit like Pandemonium, with the 3d levels rotating round as you fly from left to right. The problem is, just using one analogue stick to control the flying fella is a bit too simple and made me almost as bored as a standard chicken in Hugh Firnley-Whittingstall’s chicken experiment last week. Also, if you have to restart a level you have to go all the way back to the beginning and sit through the unskippable cut-scenes again, nice as they are.
This brings me to the graphics. The cut scenes look lovely but when in the main game it looks like a Dreamcast game. I know the Wii can do better graphics than this and have a more responsive Wii remote – Super Mario Galaxy anyone?
To be frank I’m disappointed with this game, it looked good when I saw the footage but it’s just not that much fun to play. In essence it feels like a 2d platformer wrapped up in a 3d engine and it’s quite frustrating to play.
Having said that, some gamers will get some pleasure out of it but in my mind, this was better off left in the past 10 years ago and not dragged kicking and screaming into 2008.
Knights, Journey of Dreams needs to wake up and so gets an average 5 out of 10.
