You almost feel sorry for Capcom, really. I’m not usually in the business for feeling too much sympathy with anyone to be quite frank, but when it comes to Zack and Wiki I feel rather pained for them. Thankfully it’s not due to the game being a bit naff; if anything, Zack and Wiki is one of the finest titles the Wii has. Its charming, dead good fun, makes great use of the control system and – heaven forbid – will actually make you use the stretchy rubber ball in your head for a change. If this were a Nintendo first-party release this would be selling out across the country as we speak.

Sadly, it isn’t. Looking across the pond to the hulking colossus that is the United States brings little solace, either: Zack and Wiki sold a pitiful 35,000 copies in the first month of release over there. This leads one to summarise that the bods at the various Nintendo regional offices wouldn’t know a good thing if it leapt off the floor and bit them in the arse, and that the complete lack of marketing for the game is a rather sad oversight to say the least.

You’ll have to forgive me for making you read through a couple of paragraphs of political soapboxing to get to this point. If Zack and Wiki had been some throwaway puzzle adventure title I would probably have waffled on about something or other instead, but it really, really isn’t. If you own a Wii you should take great interest in the below and make a beeline for your nearest purveyor of video game goods as soon as possible, because Zack and Wiki is truly ace. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s really bloody good indeed.

The game kicks itself into action with your two main characters high up in the sky in a little biplane piloted by a red-nosed rabbit by the name of Johnny Style. Ace, eh? After a bit of comic chattery and a slight tutorial into the basics of the game, the plane is attacked and plunges earthward, upon which you take full control and have to solve a simple first puzzle, the completion of which introduces you to the main story you’ll be running through. To put it in basic terms, think of a slightly whacky version of Treasure Hunt, minus Anneka Rice but plus pretty much everything else, with the player having to reconstruct a rather suspicious talking skeleton by finding the sixteen parts of his body scattered throughout the game.

It rather screams action adventure much in the way of Ratchet and Clank or Jak and Daxter, but this is where Capcom’s cartoon double-act take a left turn and head off in a completely different, refreshing direction. Set over a number of levels grouped into a collection of themed areas, the game sees you having to guide Zack and Wiki around in a point-and-click manner, picking up items to use in various circumstances and solving some rather clever logistical posers in order for them to get their grubby mits on the treasure at the end. It’s rather like Monkey Island meets The Incredible Machine.

Say, for example, you find your characters stranded on a rock with a tree and a vast chasm that needs to be crossed. Pottering around a little and picking up a rock will see a rather nasty looking insect make a dash at you. By using Wiki – the little golden monkey guy – as a bell by shaking the Wii-mote, the insect is transformed into a saw that the player can use to cut down the tree, forming a bridge. Initial puzzles see the player introduced gradually to the numerous mechanics they can exploit at various stages in the game, and it’s a credit to the control scheme and the developers that it lodges and actively encourages the will to experiment in your brain right from those early levels.

It’s this encouragement to experiment, allied to the sheer variety of tasks on offer, which really makes Zack and Wiki the top-notch puzzler that it is. Each level offers the player an amount of points (or HirameQs, to give them their proper name) for undertaking the puzzles in as intelligent a manner as possible, with each area needing a certain amount of HirameQ points for the player to progress. Should you complete a particular level and not feel like you’ve done yourself justice the option to retry the thing over again presents itself too, although with previous experience this reduces the levels to somewhat of a speed run.

There’s a heck of a lot to do, though, and some of the puzzles verge on ingenious. One particular favourite level of mine saw me having to run around a snow-clad park, being chased by a robot that homed in on the footsteps I was making in the snow. After a few haphazard experiments I came to realise that shaking the trees around the level covered my footsteps and threw the robot off track, allowing me to set about collecting the various tools I needed to complete the level and get the treasure. It slots together beautifully, and the ‘eureka!’ moments you get when you unravel the trickier levels is up there amongst the most rewarding you’ll find.

The real fun, though, is the way that the Wii-mote has been used for all sorts of context-sensitive puzzling. Whether it be using the thing as a fishing rod, turning it sideways to balance or punch, shaking it to flick snow off trees or turning it like a key to open locked doors, there’s plenty to do and for the most part it all works really rather well indeed. In fact, is has a case to be one of the best uses of the Wii-mote to date, and it’s a pleasure to find a game exploiting the native hardware rather than lazily adapting itself to it. With so much to do it could have risked becoming a little confusing, but thankfully each time you are required to do something a handy little diagram gives you the Wii-mote position and a basic run-through of what you need to try and do.

It doesn’t always work quite so well, mind. During one area-ending boss joust you are required to angle a light beam toward positioned mirrors in order to shoot the bad guy, but whatever you seem to do the Wii-mote never quite arranges itself in a position that allows you to angle the beam without frustratingly going the wrong way. Another slight mishap occurs during an optional mini game where you have to chime the Wii-mote like a bell in time with a tune in order to unlock the in-game music for listening to at your base of operations. It sounds fun, but in reality the Wii-mote feels far too fluffy and inaccurate when you’re attempting it, and given the level of precision needed to successfully complete the task it gets very frustrating, very quickly.

Still, it’s not game-breaking stuff, and quite quickly the niggles there are will be forgotten amongst the vast wave of tasks thrown your way. Very rarely do you get the creeping sense that you’ve completed an identical puzzle somewhere before, and despite the trial-and-error nature that all puzzle games have, Zack and Wiki never seems to punish you too much for making a mistake. Sure, you can die in a number of bizarre and occasionally rather disturbing manners, but running through the parts of the level you’ve done anyway doesn’t take too long once you fathom it all out. Even then, the game offers you the chance to swap in-game loot for resurrection and hint offerings, so if you really don’t fancy repeating yourself you don’t have to.

The sense of fun is aided no end by the game’s presentation, too. It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the old Klonoa games Wind Waker, with some beautifully shaded semi-cartoon graphics allowing the characters to emote in an array of amusing manners, and the levels to look varied, colourful and stylish. The character design is wonderfully bizarre at times, with Zack being a mute little pirate with big hair and being accompanied by a flying golden monkey chum who speaks in the kind of semi-Japanese squeaks you often find in this style of game. The music joins in the fun too, providing the sort of annoyingly catchy hum-along melodies that you’ll find yourself nodding away to when you really probably shouldn’t.

It’ll last you a good while too, with a whole host of sneaky bonus items to discover, quest logs to fill and high scores to aim for. When coupled with the impressive assortment of puzzles and tasks and the fantastic use of the Wii controller, it all adds up to become a game that every Wii owner should at least try. Yes - that means you. The fact that Zack and Wiki is selling so poorly is somewhat of a disgrace and the chances are that if things continue the way they are it’ll be a cherished rarity rather than a vaunted success. At the tail-end of last year, a number of other gaming websites started a ‘Buy Zack and Wiki’ campaign to try and highlight the issue somewhat. Consider me a badge-carrying member.