They promised us the dawning of new franchises with the Wii. Project H.A.M.M.E.R. is a result of this promise; a violent hammer-slashing game by Nintendo, exclusively for the Wii with an incredibly involving story. Or not.

Listen to this, because things are seriously screwed in the United States. Killer robots are everywhere and there's nobody to stop them. Nobody? Well, there is this half man, half robot type of guy who's able to smash those terror-robots to pieces. He has this special kind of weapon – and the power to save the world! That YOU can control!

Sounds pretty lame, right? But the actual gameplay minutes I got were kind of fun. On the screen there's a macho man with an enormous hammer. While the nunchuck controls the movements of the still nameless macho man, the wiimote is there to move the hammer; moving the wiimote down results in smashing the hammer down in the game. This way you can beat the hell out of those robots, hammer style.

It is pretty silly to move your Wiimote down, like you would do to squash a fly, and then see your movements mimicked with incredible violence on the screen. I felt like a sissy with just a small controller in my hand, while mister macho man on the screen has this huge hammer to deal with. Other than that this type of control works fine. Of course, there are more different ways to use the hammer. The funniest one was to rotate the wiimote around to make the hammer swinging above your head; a great way to impress the ladies. To charge your hammer for a special move you have to pull the Wiimote back. When the hammer is fully loaded you can smash it to the ground by moving the remote down to the deal with the more stubborn objects around you.

This hammer-controlling seems ideal to have enough destroyable objects in the game. From what I saw there were some, but definitely not enough yet. There were some cars that could be destroyed – and I did that just for fun whahaha – but other than that there were few other destructible elements in the scenery. However this is something I'm sure will be rectified; it's a no-brainer gamers will want to smash the living daylights out of everything in sight if they can.

Visually the game looks solid, nothing to get too excited about, but there are some nice effect; parts of the destroyed robots sticking to the camera, nice explosions, that kind of thing. The environment where the demo took place was a really grey and dull place. A typical city-invested-by-robots look, you could say.

For now it seems like Project H.A.M.M.E.R provides some linear action that can be expected from a game like this. There's not much depth in gameplay, or story wise for that matter. At least not from what we can see for now, but it does what it promises. It lets you destroy robots, more robots, and even giant boss robots with the wiimote. Nice when you want to let that anger deep inside you free.

What can really suit this game - and could be really fun – is a two-player coop mode. Unfortunately no announcements on this have been made yet. A mode like this, or an online mode, can distinctly put this title from an ordinary action game with just unique controls. We're still kept in the dark about the release date of this title, it looks like it could do with some work, but there's definitely potential for something rather special when the time comes. We'll keep you updated.