You would be surprised at how real-world ethics dangerously coincide with gaming, whether it be inside an alternate reality or merely by rules governing such realms. Genetic engineering, and by extent, cloning, has a way of going sour quickly. Not all attempts will be futile, of course, but many die a quick meaningless death. In this way, popular games have had their slew of clones, such as Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed. The series returns with a Wii exclusive to give the Nintendo demographic a taste of the repercussions of cloning and the misery involved.

Like most romance stories in the Destroy All Humans franchise, Big Willy Unleashed involves comedic genocide for the whole family. In this instance, the love story is between an alien leader and his love for fast food/controlling the unknowing Earth populace. You, as the undying (or in this case multi-cloned) Crypto, must help him execute his wily plan.

The story, dialogue and subsequent objectives all have a very boyish charm. The basis of the game is funny, and the characters run with the entendres throughout with a maintained grace that never falls flat and never wears sophomoric. Everything stays funny and interesting on the verbal interaction levels of the game. Even with the somewhat slapped on and forced 1970s façade, the laughs are pretty frequent, and the games parody, anecdotal, referential and, at times, self-loathing humor help escort you through some of the hit but mostly miss portions of gameplay.

I wish there was just the one flaw that the humor sometimes showcased in Big Willy Unleashed is slightly cliché; it would have never really hurt anyone. Unfortunately, the mechanics go from bad to worse as the game goes on. The controls are the worst offender, and their atrocious ways seep into almost every part of what makes Big Willy Unleashed a disaster. The ineffectiveness of mapping the camera to the Wii-mote has been revealed as slightly troublesome to incredibly problematic in the past, and history repeats itself once again. The quick menus are usually awkward to fumble through, and the pointer always seems to twist the camera around while trying to find its center on the sensor bar. Most missions don’t require even a slight focus on reaction time or accuracy, which makes the control issues look all the more foolish.

Had the camera mapping and quick menus been just a hiccup, Big Willy Unleashed might have had some redeeming qualities. The game somehow manages worse vehicle controls, which is a shame since Big Willy Unleashed centers on mostly vehicular-based objectives. The titular Big Willy doesn’t escape this fate, but the saucer suffers the worse. With no defensive maneuvers or any basic turning functionality, the vehicles fail on all levels of navigation — and then some. The overall experience of the Wii controls and functionality really fall nothing short of awful and completely turned me off from even finishing the game, despite trying to drag myself on and giving the game multiple chances to redeem itself.

The only other faucets of Big Willy Unleashed to mention are how outdated the graphics are. They’re more akin to early PlayStation titles than anything proper for the Wii. The sound is also directly recycled from an earlier Destroy All Humans game, so I couldn’t even brag about that if I wanted to. The game would have been uninspired and mediocre without the Wii-related problems, but it launches far into the realm of intolerable and destroys the wall of lazy design at the end of its short flight.

At this point, some reviewers would try to poke fun at something this bad to cushion the hard-to-take quality or would even try to come up with some clever metaphors involving dead animals or ruined childhood aspirations as a direct result of playing this game. While I’m sure a few puppies died as a direct result of being near the manufacturing plant of Destroy All Humans — and I’ll never enjoy my own Christmas memories again just for having played Big Willy Unleashed — this game is beyond remorseful farce. The Wii may be weaker than its technologically superior console brethren, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be abused as such. The corner cutting in this game is shameful and does a terrible service to what the system is actually quite capable of. Just because the controller is unique and the processing power is weaker, attempts at third party support don’t have to be useless endeavors.

I understand that the PS2 and the PSP versions of Big Willy Unleashed were canceled. That’s usually a red flag that something is wrong. Whether the co-development of all three systems was a problem or whether they just didn’t have the money, I don’t know. I am aware, though, that the bad controls in this game and the ugly graphics are the fault of the developer, not the system. My hope is for people to start realizing that as soon as you stop buying these piss-poor excuses for games, the publishers will stop wasting money, and we will get an attempt at something worthwhile.

I hope the complete standstill of progress Destroy All Humans displays is only temporary, as the first game was loads of fun. Whether or not that will happen is dependent on what complete saps the Wii-user demographic is made of. I’ll be curious to see how many more of these we get, and I’ll be sure to scold Wii gamers at large accordingly.