The gameplay would have been bad enough, had the gameplay mechanics actually worked. Alas, they do not. The controls are borderline unresponsive, and they will frustrate you to tears. The controls are exclusively mapped to the Wii-mote. The (B) button will make your character walk forward, and pointing at the screen will aim your flashlight. Turns out, pointing is also how you turn your character. Whenever you point away at the screen, your character will turn at a preset speed. You can only stop turning once you've pointed straight to the middle of your television. It's just a mess.
Occasionally, a ghost will attack you. Flashing arrows at the edges of your screen will indicate which direction you must swipe your Wii-mote. Hooray for mindless Wii-waggle! Truth time: it's not fun and it's consistently unresponsive throughout.
Whose idea was it to make the main character walk at less than a snail's pace? I'm not exaggerating -- the characters you control are probably the slowest-moving characters in all of gaming. Think back to how slow you moved in the Aftermath mission of Call of Duty 4. These characters aren't hauling their own broken bodies of the burning wreckage of a downed helicopter, but they move like they are. Are they really that scared? If so, what a bunch of world-class sissies. This inexplicable lethargy kills the pacing of the game and makes it that much more dull.
A second player can join in the tedium, but the "multiplayer" is not a cooperative affair at all. The role of the second player is to trigger jump scares. (Oh, no!) It's a laughably stupid mechanic that is consistent with the poor quality of the entire experience. Still, it's not like full-fledged co-op would have worked in JU-ON to begin with.
This game bills itself as a "haunted house simulator." Haunted houses are supposed to be fun, if memory serves me correctly. JU-ON: The Grudge could call itself a "crappy survival horror game simulator," but then again, it wouldn't be a simulation.
