20 Best Wii Action Games

Shadow Assassins is the Wii's Tenchu, and it splits the story between the series' two ninja. You play the first five stages and the last one as Rikimaru, and stages six to nine as Ayame. The Wii Remote is also used for first-person sword fighting, so a duel means swinging the remote at the screen. Collect all of the map pieces in normal mode and you get an extended ending, which hints that an old enemy's hatred lives on in Ayame.

The PSP version plays generally the same, so the Wii one is the pick if you want the sword fights to feel physical. A ninja game about patience is a nice change of pace on a list this loud. It is the last game that made the cut, and it earned its spot.

In Disaster: Day of Crisis you play Raymond, and the world keeps falling apart around him. In one early scene Ray helps the mayor of Blue Ridge free a trapped citizen from debris, then finds the evacuation zone at West Park engulfed in flames, with a fire twister on the way. Between the disasters there are gunfights. You can carry up to three weapons of your choice, along with a pistol that never runs out of ammo.

Saving people is the other half of the game. You carry survivors to safety or get them through a first aid minigame before their stamina meter runs out, and rescuing enough of them raises Ray's maximum health. The humour is quirky, with a strange Metal Gear Solid streak to it. It is a big disaster movie you get to play.

Samurai Heroes is the third major game in the Sengoku Basara series, and the second to come out worldwide. It reached the PlayStation 3 and the Wii in Japan in July 2010 and everywhere else in October. You lead a famous commander of 16th century Japan, fighting for control of camps until you hold the whole battlefield. In the Hero's Story mode your choices change history, so friends can become enemies.

The Western release was made harder on purpose. The difficulty levels were renamed, so Japan's Normal became Easy and Japan's Hard became Normal. Licensing also cost it the T.M.Revolution opening song, which was swapped for an instrumental track by Rei Kondoh. When players are asked for a Wii hack and slash, this is one of the names that keeps coming up.

Manhunt 2 is Rockstar's sequel to Manhunt, and the Wii version was made by Rockstar Toronto. You play Daniel Lamb, a mental patient with amnesia, who breaks out of an asylum guided by Leo Kasper, a sociopathic assassin. The twist is that Leo lives in Daniel's head. A brain implant called the Pickman Bridge was meant to make him the perfect assassin, and when it malfunctioned, Daniel started talking to the personality inside it.

The controversy began two days after the game was announced, before anyone had seen a single screenshot. The director of the British Board of Film Classification put out a statement about rejecting it. The version that came out hides its executions behind a blur, with the screen turning red and flashing black-and-white. It was still nominated for GameSpy's 2007 Game of the Year on the PS2. It is grim, and that is the point.

Geometry Wars started life as a bonus game inside Project Gotham Racing 2 on the Xbox, and Galaxies was the first one released on a non-Microsoft console. Kuju Entertainment made it, and it came out in North America in November 2007. You fly a claw-shaped ship around an arena, shooting geometric shapes to score points and stay alive. On the Wii, moving and firing are controlled separately with the motion controls.

Purists can plug in a Classic Controller for the old twin-stick feel. Galaxies adds a campaign with its own twists, like levels that give you only one life or no bombs at all. You also get a drone you can set to defend you or to bait enemies away. The original Retro Evolved is on the disc too. It is the purest arcade game on this list, built for one more go.

Other M is the Metroid that went to Team Ninja, after series creator Yoshio Sakamoto approached the studio. You hold the Wii Remote sideways and play from a third-person view. It is the first Metroid with melee attacks. You can dodge at the last second with the Sense Move, or jump on a weakened enemy and fire a charged shot at point-blank range with the Overblast. Point the remote at the screen and the view switches to first person for missiles, though you cannot move while you aim.

Critics praised its cutscenes and its action-oriented gameplay, but its story was criticized by critics and fans alike. Sales were disappointing for a flagship Nintendo series, and no new main Metroid came out until Dread in 2021. Players who come to it for the fighting rather than the plot call it a surprisingly good action game. Skip the cutscenes if you must.

The Complete Saga puts the first two Lego Star Wars games together on one disc, covering the first six episodes of the Skywalker Saga. Traveller's Tales made it, and it came out in North America on 6 November 2007. Characters play differently. Jedi and Sith have lightsabers and the Force, and others use blasters and grappling hooks to reach hidden areas. Between levels you wander the Cantina, the hub for the whole game.

It also adds new tricks to the old levels. Prequel characters can now dodge blaster fire, and they get their own special melee attacks. Chewbacca's is ripping off arms. Drop-in co-op lets a second player join at any time, which makes it an easy pick for two people on one couch. Free Play mode keeps you coming back for the collectibles long after the credits.

Star Successor is the sequel to Sin and Punishment on the Nintendo 64, set many years after the first game. You play Isa Jo, the son of the first game's heroes Saki and Airan, or a mysterious young woman named Kachi. It is an arcade-style rail shooter, but you are free to move around while the level pulls you forward. Melee attacks handle anything that gets too close, and a rolling dodge works in any direction.

The enemies come in swarms and the bosses are over the top, and beating them builds a point multiplier for the online leaderboard. A second player can join in too. One player called it "Easily top ten Wii game", and it is hard to argue. If you like Star Fox but wish it were much harder, this is the one.

Deadly Creatures is the strangest pitch on this list. Rainbow Studios made it and THQ published it, and you play as a desert hairy scorpion and a tarantula, fighting other creatures in the dirt. The two play differently. The scorpion's levels are more about fighting, while the tarantula sneaks through less linear levels and shoots webs with the pointer. Most of the small fry, like crickets and pill bugs, can be eaten to get health back.

The bosses are where it gets wild. You face a Gila monster and a rattlesnake, and eventually a human. The fights are meant to feel like a monster movie, King Kong or Jurassic Park at the scale of a garden. Motion controls handle the special attacks and finishing moves. It is an odd little game, and we love it for that.

The Force Unleashed tells the story of Darth Vader's secret apprentice, Starkiller, voiced by Sam Witwer, and it bridges the gap between the prequels and the original trilogy. It came out in North America on September 16, 2008. The Wii port plays very differently from the other versions. Its biggest change is full motion control for the lightsaber, so you swing the remote to swing the blade.

The Wii version also has a duel mode where two players fight as famous Jedi and Sith. Some big moments from the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, like pulling a Star Destroyer out of the sky, are simplified or shown as cutscenes. The Wii version held up well enough that Aspyr remastered it for the Switch in 2022. The game sold over 1,000,000 copies in its debut month, and plenty of those were waved around in living rooms.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game reunites the original cast, with Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson voicing their characters. Aykroyd and Ramis wrote the story, and Aykroyd later called the game "essentially the third movie". You play a new recruit who joins the team as ghosts flood Manhattan again. It has the soundtrack from the original film as well.

The Wii version has one thing the others do not. It is the only one with offline multiplayer, and the whole story can be played by two people in split-screen. A versus mode was advertised for the Wii too, but it never made it into the final game. It was also Harold Ramis's final turn as Egon Spengler before his death in 2014, which gives the whole thing a slightly sad glow now.

The Forgotten Sands came out on several systems, but the Wii got its own game under the same name. Ubisoft Quebec made it, with a completely different story and setting from the other versions, plus motion controls on top of the usual buttons. A second player can help out locally by freezing enemies or traps on the screen, or by helping to unlock secret areas.

Reviewers called the graphics last generation and the combat dull, but they praised its creative mechanics and its story. The disc also hides some nice extras, including the classic Prince of Persia. After Forgotten Sands the series went on hiatus until The Lost Crown in early 2024, so for years this was the last new Prince of Persia on a Nintendo home console. It deserves more players than it got.

Monster Hunter Tri was meant to be a PlayStation 3 game, but high development costs killed that plan and Capcom made it for the Wii instead. You hunt huge beasts in an ecosystem that now reaches underwater, and you fight down there too. The new Switch Axe flips between an axe and a sword. Alone, you hunt alongside Cha-Cha, an AI partner who helps with tracking and trapping.

Online, up to four players could hunt together, and two could share one TV for some quests. One bundle even packed it with a black Wii and a Classic Controller Pro. The North American and European servers shut down on April 30, 2013, so the online side is gone, but the offline hunts still work. Players still recommend it, and some call it their favourite game on the console.

In Pandora's Tower you play Aeron, a former soldier who climbs into thirteen towers to break a curse that is turning Elena into a beast. He fights with a magical sword and chain. The only cure is the flesh of each tower's master, and Elena's curse worsens the longer you stay inside, shown by a meter on the screen. You keep running back out to feed her, so finding shortcuts matters as much as fighting.

It was Ganbarion's first original game after years of licensed work, and Satoru Iwata let it go ahead despite his reservations. Nintendo released it in Europe but had no plan for North America, so Xseed brought it over in April 2013. There is no original music, and the soundtrack uses samples of Western classical music instead. The boss fights are built like puzzles, and they are the reason to play.

Desperate Struggle opens with Travis Touchdown at the bottom of the assassin rankings, and he has to fight his way back to number one. It is the only game in the series that Suda51 did not lead as director. Nobutaka Ichiki took over, and Suda moved to executive director. Travis can now carry two swords, and some boss fights throw several bosses at you at once.

It also lets you play as Shinobu and Henry. Shinobu's sections add some platforming, and Henry can dash in any direction. Critics thought it was better than the first game, and a Switch port arrived in 2020. Players who loved No More Heroes tell newcomers to play both, and we agree. Just play them in order.

MadWorld was the first game from PlatinumGames, made two years after the studio formed. Everything is black and white except the blood, which is very red, and the look was inspired by Frank Miller's Sin City. You score points for every enemy you take down. You can go back to any finished level to chase a higher score or try a harder challenge.

Inaba, of PlatinumGames, played Manhunt 2 to see how it showed violence, so that MadWorld would not make the same choices. The game was a commercial failure, though critics liked it, and it reached America and Europe almost a full year before Japan. Action fans still name it among their Wii favourites. It was a loud reminder that the family console could be very rude.

Muramasa is a side-scrolling action RPG set on Honshu during the Edo period, from the team that made Odin Sphere. Director George Kamitani based the story on kabuki theatre and wove in Japanese folklore. You play either a ninja or a kunoichi, and both are caught up in the fight over the cursed Demon Blades. Combat runs on a single attack button, and an upward slash throws an enemy into the air.

The art is drawn by hand, and the art and music got most of the praise, while the gameplay was called fun but shallow. The Western release kept the Japanese voices to protect the mood. It found a second life on the PS Vita as Muramasa Rebirth, and another version, Revenant Blades, is due in 2027. Players bring it up the moment Wii action games come up, mostly for how it looks.

No More Heroes was directed, designed and written by Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51. Travis Touchdown is an anime otaku who kills an assassin called Helter Skelter and becomes the 11th best assassin in the United Assassins Association. From there he wants to climb to number one, and ten other assassins stand above him. The town between fights is full of nods to Japanese cult films and anime.

Critics praised its writing and soundtrack, though some found it repetitive. It had a muted launch in Japan but did much better in the West, selling 208,000 copies in North America. Three sequels followed. Players recommend it to anyone after a Wii hack and slash, and they say to start with this one before the sequel.

Ōkami started on the PlayStation 2, and after Clover Studio closed, Capcom brought it to the Wii in 2008 with help from Ready at Dawn and Tose. You play Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, in the form of a white wolf, saving a version of classical Japan from darkness. The world looks like a moving ink painting in the sumi-e style. The name is a pun, since ōkami can mean either "great god" or "wolf" in Japanese.

The Celestial Brush lets you draw gestures to perform miracles, and on the Wii you draw them with the remote, which feels like the way it was meant to be played. Not everyone agreed, and the motion controls got mixed reviews. The gameplay is modeled on The Legend of Zelda, director Hideki Kamiya's favourite series, and Ōkami is now seen as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Resident Evil 4 had a long road to the Wii. Development began on the PlayStation 2 in 1999, and one early version, directed by Hideki Kamiya, changed so much that it became Devil May Cry instead. Shinji Mikami finally took over as director. The result moved the camera behind Leon, zooming over his shoulder when you aim, and you buy upgrades from a Merchant who turns up in various places.

The Wii Edition is the one to play on this console. It includes the PlayStation 2 bonus content, and aiming with the remote uses a larger reticle that turns from green to red on a target. A new quick knife command goes for the nearest enemy, and it is a little easier than other versions. Players treat it as the obvious Wii action pick, and a list without it gets complaints. Players recommend it more than any other Wii action game.