Gamertell Review: Dive: Medes Islands Secret for Wii

Title: Dive: The Medes Islands Secret
Price: $10 (1,000 Wii Points)
System(s): Wii (WiiWare)
Release Date: July 26, 2010
Publisher (Developer): Cosmonaut Games (Cosmonaut Games)
ESRB Rating: “Everyone” for Mild Violence
Pros: 3 save slots, 3 difficulty levels, artifacts to find, achievements to earn, can see achievement requirements before unlocking them, extra oxygen tanks and tranquilizer darts are littered along ocean floor, fish are quite colorful and add a little something extra to make environments look nice and there are checkpoints which save your progress and restore oxygen scattered throughout dive areas. Some fish enemies will hunt you down. Simple controls. Can reset bought
Cons: Text on story scene segments is a bit small, can upgrade equipment. Some enemies and harmful fish are difficult to see until you’re right on top of them and already attacked. Music doesn’t add anything to the atmosphere. Dives can get repetative. The dive areas all look pretty similar. In almost every case, the treasures for the level are on the far right side of the map.
Overall Score: One thumb up, one thumb down, 75/100, C, * * 1/2 out of 5

Despite the success of the Endless Ocean games, there haven’t been too many Wii games which look at undersea life. Dive: The Medes Islands Secret helps fix that. Cosmonaut’s newest WiiWare game tasks players with searching for all kinds of underwater treasures and relics while avoiding lots of life-threatening undersea denizens which can sap your precious oxygen away with the slightest touch.

Dive: The Medes Islands Secret is a treasure hunting simulation. You go on dives off islands around Spain, Portugal and other European locations to try and see if you can find sunken treasures. As you progress, you find items for your collection, earn achievements and get money to buy better equipment so you dive deeper for longer periods of time, move faster and get other items that make dives easier. To make things easier, you can reset your purchases at any time and repurchase equipment with all earned money to date to get what you need most for the mission.

Each diving session is a treasure hunt. You choose a location and dive. You then have to check the compass in the upper left hand corner of the screen to see treasure locations and depth. Right below that gauge is an oxygen gauge which tells you how much longer you have before the dive is over. The goal is to pick up any cash or treasure you see as fast as you can, before you’re forced to return to the ship.

Dive: The Medes Islands Secret is very easy to pick up and play. All you need is the Wii remote. Point at a spot and press B to swim. Press B twice and you’ll swim there slightly faster for a moment. While pointing at an enemy fish or anemone, press and hold A to shoot a tranquilizer dart to you can pass safely. If you can manage to do all that, you can get through and explore any area in Dive. This means it’s a good title for beginners or casual gamers, which make up a good number of Wii owners.

The only thing that may deter more casual gamers is that Dive is so dangerous! Even on the Easy difficulty level, the waters are filled with hostile aquatic life that want to hunt you down. The first level is incredibly easy, and instills a false sense of security with only the occasional jellyfish, anemone and lionfish. But after that you’ll be hunted down by sharks, gigantic eels, manta rays, huge jellyfish and more. (I never knew rays were so vicious!) Pretty much anything you touch will hurt you. This isn’t a negative though – if these predators weren’t around then Dive would be quite a boring experience. In fact, the predators make you think more strategically about each dive you undertake.

In most cases, once you’ve finished collecting all treasures from an area there’s no reason to return. This really hurts Dive: The Medes Islands Secret‘s replay value. It isn’t that the undersea areas aren’t pretty, but the fish all start to look alike, the undersea areas start to all look alike and there aren’t a lot of branching paths with secret passages or exotic environments you’d want to explore for fun. Fortunately, most dive locations do have one or two extra treasures hidden in lower areas you can only reach after getting better equipment. But even then, unless you really want those achievements or items so you can see their icon’s in the in-game menu, there’s not much motivation to return.

Dive: The Medes Islands Secret isn’t bad, but it doesn’t compare to Nintendo’s Endless Ocean series. While the premise is different for both, since Dive focuses on treasure hunting and Endless Ocean on undersea exploration and interactions, they’re so similar that someone who might be interested in an ocean exploration adventure game might decide to go with one or the other. And in that case, Endless Ocean will always win, even though it’s more expensive.

Dive: The Medes Islands Secret doesn’t do anything that really makes it stand out among other WiiWare games. If you’re looking for a relaxing, yet challenging exploration experience along the lines of Endless Ocean, then it’s worth looking at. However, the dives do get quite repetative quickly and it’s fairly short for a 1,000 Wii Points game. I wouldn’t say it’s a must own game, but it may be worth checking out if you enjoy exploration games and have some spare Wii Points you’re dying to spend.

Site [Dive: The Medes Islands Secret]