Alongside pretending to be Luke Skywalker, with a lightsaber in hand making a strange wooshing noise, donning brown hat and picking up a whip to collect treasure has got to be one of the top adolescent fantasies for most men my age (figure that one out for yourself).

So it was with great relish (and with my brown hat on) that I sat down - with the Wii it’s actually stand up, but you get my point - to become Indiana Jones for a few escapist hours.

This is not the Lego version either, far from it. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, by LucasArts and A2M, is adventuring for purists, admittedly with a rather poor Harrison Ford stand in.

Richmond and Twickenham Times: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings - Wii

The characters are life like, the settings are straight from the silver screen and the storyline is a welcome return to good old fashioned treasure hunting following the nonsense of Crystal Skulls (sorry, I just didn’t like it). Dr Jones finds himself traversing the globe in search of the Staff of Moses and fighting the ever-present Nazi enemy.

So with nunchuck in left hand and Wii remote in right, I started the tutorial and was taught how to jab, hook and uppercut with both hands.

Then I was taught, oh joy of joys, to use the whip by using the trigger button and cracking the remote! The whip can disarm, harm and pull your enemies in for an Indy-style beating - great fun!

The great man can also use his environment to hurt his enemies, which will be familiar to any fan of the films. Spades can be used to smack your opponents silly, pool balls will stop the most hardened foe in their tracks and bin lids are semi-deadly frisbees of the funniest kind.

Whole parts of scenery can be pulled down on to enemies and there is a real immersion in this part of the game.

Richmond and Twickenham Times: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings - wii

In this sense, the game is absolutely brilliant. It’s Indiana Jones to the nth degree, with great settings and set pieces, camp comedy and ridiculous tales of survival against apparently insurmountable odds.

Flying levels and shootouts are also well done and great fun.

But it’s also my very sad duty to report that the fighting controls just don’t work well enough, and are pretty much the meat of the whole game. Far too much is based on the motion of the remote and nunchuck and the system isn’t responsive enough.

Half the time the punch you want to throw does not register, meaning you’ve got umpteen baddies descending upon you and you’re desperately trying to do anything to get them off you, including throwing the remote at the television (this doesn’t work either, just in case you’re tempted).

If the developer had stuck to motion control for just the whip, it would’ve been happy days, but the game instead becomes an utterly exhausting exercise in waggling. All Wii gamers know how frustrating it is when the motion controls do not register and you’re up against numerous enemies coming at you from all angles. This happens far too much in this game.

This is perhaps not a terminal problem with the game, but it comes way too close to being so.

Richmond and Twickenham Times: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings

There is still a lot of fun to be had, although the main game is over in five or six hours (I’d challenge you to carry on much longer than this though).

The co-operative mode is not up to much, with more emphasis on problem solving and an insane waggle-fest than meaty game play.

Overall, this game is a disappointment, but for fans desperate to pretend they’re Indy for a few evenings, I’d say it’s worth a crack (of the whip).

Verdict: Six portions of chilled monkey brains out of 10.

The good
- You are Indiana Jones
- He has a whip
- Destructible environments
- Great set pieces
- Bonus extra: Classic game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Better than Crystal Skulls

The bad
- God awful control system
- God awful control system
- God awful control system
- God awful control system
- Pointless co-op mode