Stop Stress has an excellent premise, reminding me of the classic film "Falling Down"; much like that movie, this game stars a normal guy in modern society who has had enough of life’s annoyances and decides to get rid of them by force. That could be the formula for a very awesome game, and this ’first person destroyer’ has the right idea but completely botches the execution. A single-player game, Stop Stress is controlled using the Wiimote and Nunchuk; the latter looks around and crouches, while the Wiimote can be swung around as your weapon and also controls your movement via the d-pad.

Your goal in each stage, what few levels there are, is to smash certain objects without taking too long or being hit too many times; you’re on a time limit and have a ’stress meter’ for health. While this is played in a first person perspective, your controls are limited; you can only walk directly to and from various waypoints on the ground, ensuring you have to follow a specific path throughout most of the level. Along the way, you’ll have to fight various enemies such as insects, rats, security guards, and more; all stated to be hallucinations, according to the manual. Defeat them, meet your objective, and you’ll be ready to move on to the next level.

So what went wrong? Several things. First, smashing objects isn’t as fun as it sounds. There are only so many things in each stage to break, and only a few are particularly satisfying to hit. Combined with the time limit and being required to break a certain number of specific objects to beat the stage, you wind up with a very linear, almost ’on rails’ experience rather than a sandbox approach which probably would have worked much better. Additionally, you’re limited to just a few hand-to-hand weapons like hammers and baseball bats along with some rocks to throw and none of them feel particularly powerful. You may need to use an axe to bust open a door, or a hammer to break a crate blocking your path, but beyond that there’s no reason to really care about each weapon. Likewise, the enemies are very easy to deal with and it’s only the sheer number of them that makes them even slightly challenging... but also very annoying, since you must destroy every single one you encounter.

Each stage is pretty short, able to be beaten within five to ten minutes. That might sound long for most genres, but when you only have a handful of levels that means Stop Stress can be beaten in under an hour. Stop Stress suffers from being very short, having clumsy controls, and failing to make the best of its premise. Waving the Wiimote over and over to vaguely simulate bashing an axe against a door or alarm clock or whatever else is bothering the main character loses its charm quickly, so you can’t even say this is short but sweet; it’s just short. Even the occasional boss and mid-boss encounters do little to liven things up, since they can be beaten by learning their extremely simple patterns.

The graphics and sound are worth going over, as Stop Stress actually gets three of the four major aspects of these things right. The music is very fast and frantic, so it does its job of getting you in a mood to start swinging at things and that’s definitely worth some praise. Likewise, the sound effects of various items breaking are nice enough, and your character’s heavy, furious breathing as he vents his rage is fairly convincing. Building on that, the cutscene graphics that set the story for each stage are very, very well done; they’re whimsical and exaggerated but they fit nicely in the tone of this game. The problem lies in the graphics during actual play, as they look very simple... indeed, they look only a little better than the sort of 3D models you would see back in the mid 90s on PC and Playstation 1 games, with plainly visible polygons making up very basic weapon designs, and similarly basic enemies. Not all of the models are this bad, but many are and it’s just another blow against this game.

Unfortunately, Stop Stress has little going for it beyond an excellent idea. A game about running around breaking various things in modern society sounds like it could be a lot of fun, but by forcing you to deal with tedious fights and destroy specific objects within a time limit, Stop Stress basically dooms itself. Short and unsatisfying, it’s bizarre to see this game priced at 800 Points/$8; the developers are basically claiming this game can go toe to toe with various SNES Virtual Console classics or a number of WiiWare titles in the same price range, and it simply can’t. With so many flaws, I cannot recommend Stop Stress for purchase.