The demo on the PAX floor placed the game's hero and former Secret Service member, Mr. Ford, on the streets of a near-future Washington D.C. sometime after a massive alien invasion. With monsters coming out in droves from what looks like inter-dimensional portals, Mr. Ford's only hope for survival is to make his way through the debris cluttered streets and find safety.

As the demo loaded, friendly demo guide and High Voltage head-honcho Eric Nofsinger gave me the details on the game's control scheme. As first it was a little overwhelming to take in. The controls sounded overly complicated, but what I quickly discovered was that in practice they were very intuitive and for good reason. High Voltage did their homework by taking a deep look at what worked (and didn't work) for other FPS games on the platform. This let High Voltage craft some the most welcoming controls a core game on Wii has to offer. The controls intelligently combine the best elements of Medal of Honor: Heroes and Metroid Prime 3 with moving Mr. Ford with the nunchuk stick and aiming with the remote, firing with the B trigger, etc. There's even a nice "lock on, but not lock on" aiming system (very similar to Metroid Prime 3) for people who aren't exactly the greatest shots like myself. With just a few motion controlled extras, The Conduit skillfully manages to find a balance between player friendly controls and all the options one would expect from a first person shooter.

The demo unfolded just like I hoped it would. Bunches of impressively rendered alien baddies rushed Mr. Ford as he blasted them all to bits with a variety of weapons, both human and alien. After obliterating small legions of alien invaders, the single player demo concluded with a large boss encounter right out of Starship Troopers. The bug-like creature was more than a little tough as I died after weakening it just a bit. While the level was a little light on story, it certainly proved that there wouldn't be much downtime between skirmishes.

One thing that we were unable to get our hands on at PAX (and something I'm dying to try) would be the comprehensive multiplayer modes that are planned for the final version. All the tried and true FPS modes we've grown to love are set to be included: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, etc. To top it off, up to 16 players will be able to jump online together to compete against each other. There are even plans to use Nintendo's new WiiSpeak peripheral. The only piece of multiplayer action that's unfortunately missing is that the game will not feature any form of cooperative player, on or offline.

The road to PAX has been an interesting one for The Conduit. High Voltage has been developing this game largely on their own time and dime. When asked whether the game has found a publisher yet as it rapidly approaches its first quarter 2009 projected release date, the High Voltage rep quickly got coy. He wasn't able to say that they have a publisher, but it sounded like they're at the end of negotiating a deal and an announcement could be made any day now. One interesting fact that he let slip was that one of the conditions the developer is standing by on their publishing deal is getting a sequel up and running as quickly as possible. Between largely self funding the development to ramping up preproduction on a sequel before the first ships, it's easy to tell that the folks at High Voltage have complete confidence in their work.

So at this point I feel almost obligated to mention how the setting and scenery strongly reminded me of the Halflife series and that the alien invaders share some similarities with Resistance's boogiemen, the Chimera. And yes, the character design of Mr. Ford is a little on the generic side. A lot of people would look down on these elements for not exactly being the most original designs within the FPS genre. But on a platform where just about every game is painstakingly "different," and at times a little too "different" for its own good, there's something enjoyable about jumping into something that feels familiar. While it may leave a little to be desired artistically, The Conduit is set to become a solid FPS experience on a platform not exactly known for gunplay and headshots.