Endless Ocean 2 Review

You get to see land animals now too

By selling some of the items you find on your dives you can build your own reef and fill your tank with the fish of your choosing. There's also a nature magazine to work for, with your underwater adventures being the perfect opportunity to snap some sought after pictures of the most beautiful marine creatures. It's not going to be riveting gameplay for everyone, but there's no denying that Endless Ocean 2 has plenty to do.

A slight disappointment is the land-based gameplay, which allows you to interact with new creatures, but suffers from overly simplistic controls. By using the same point and move system that is used underwater, your character feels a bit cumbersome when compared to other adventure games - a new control system for moving about on land would have been preferable.

Endless Ocean 2's human characters are rather robotic, coming across as slightly higher polygon versions of models from a few generations ago, but the underwater world has been wonderfully created. The Wii can't pump out as many polygons as its console rivals, but that hasn't stopped it from delivering believable sea creatures. There's a real sense of amazement as you encounter wonderful new species, big and small, and some of the underwater caves are truly spectacular sights. It's a shame that the in-game audio is so basic. In a throwback to a forgotten time, human characters don't utter a word, their lips moving along with on-screen text. The relaxing music is also quite irritating, mainly because it's more or less all you'll hear on your adventure.

Animal lovers will get some fun out of training a dolphin to do tricks (but it's not as thrilling as it sounds), and this clever friend will also go out on dives with you, offering a speed boost should you want it. Online co-op lets you dive with a friend, and there's support for the Wii Speak peripheral, making this an ideal way to spend some time with a friend - if they also feel like they want to play a game that isn't really a game.

Whether or not you should buy Endless Ocean 2 is a fairly simple decision to make. If you like the idea of generally not doing much, exploring and looking at lots of sea creatures, dive in. If the idea of shooting a gun at a fish to heal it and not blow its face off sounds bizarre, avoid.