I'm reading Rich Stanton's Eurogamer review myself. I really enjoyed his Metal Gear Rising review, he seemed to have an above-average degree of competence for a game journalist, noted he beat it on Very Hard roughly around the same time for hard, so he understands learning and understanding action game mechanics.
The main play in The Wonderful 101 comes through its combat system, which showcases Platinum's strengths as well as a key weakness of the Wii U hardware. Everything ties into the gamepad's touchscreen, and it works 90% of the time. You control a variously-sized group of Wonderful Ones that move around in a loose circle, and you fight against the chunky Geathjerk aliens by forming your team into shapes: draw a circle to form a fist, a vertical line for a sword, a sideways 'L' for a gun and so on. Time slows down while you're drawing on the gamepad and when you click 'A' to confirm the shape, it zooms right back into the action - and if you're executing correctly, both weapons can be on-screen at once. All of this ties into a power bar composed of batteries, which recharges fast. When it's empty, you're temporarily defenceless.
Morphing is The Wonderful 101's killer move, and it's nearly brilliant. What lets it down is the touchscreen, which is fine with a stylus but - let's be practical here - you can't comfortably play The Wonderful 101, which uses every button the gamepad's got, while holding one. The least inconvenient option ends up being your index finger. The gamepad's almost up to it, but not quite, confusing weapons like the whip and claw and often losing your attempted shape halfway through. As the number of weapons increase and you start switching between them mid-combo, this gets frustrating.
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It takes a while to master this style of movement and morphing, but in action it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in games. The Wonderful Ones clack together into brightly-coloured swords, whips, guns, fists, bombs, claws, and hammers, with a single hero hefting these gigantic weapons around. There's never been anything quite like this, and there' s no better example of it than the fights between Wonder Red and Prince Vorkken, his alien doppelgänger.
In the best tradition of director Hideki Kamiya's games, Vorkken has all of your moves plus a few extra, and the many fights you have against him are simply sensational: two small groups crashing giant fists against each other, switching between swords and whips and bazookas, before a good strike hits and sends one side scattering, which quickly gathers itself for another go. These battles are magnificent: intense, surprising, challenging, and eye-popping in action.
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The meat of The Wonderful 101 is the combat, but there's a huge range of one-off sequences outside of this. There are shoot-'em-up sections channelling Kamiya's beloved Space Harrier, Punch-Out boss fights, a delightfully tactile side-scrolling maze reminiscent of Dig Dug and so many more. I said at the start that this is an exciting game, and it really does get your blood pumping; one mission ends with you piloting a giant mech, having a fistfight with another robot, and then air-surfing out of the exploding volcano on a spaceship as your doomed opponent gives chase.
T (both more significant to Nintendo than W101) in August, but as a result had to push W101 to September so as not to overcrowd their August releases and keep their Wii U output post-Pikmin 3 consistent. They couldn't push it to October because of Wind Waker HD, Wii Party U, and Pokemon X&Y's blitz, so they had to settle with September, much to our dismay. I think W101 would have definitely benefited coming out earlier in the year, but it sounds like Platinum needed more time, and now it is in this position.
