A Sign Of Things To Come
After much waiting and anticipation, I can tell you now that Red Steel is a very fun game and a decent starter's title to add alongside your brand spanking new Nintendo Wii. Ubisoft have done an excellent job in producing the game for the Wii's launch and it plays much like how you would expect it to perform.
Red Steel is Ubisoft Paris's answer to a Wii first person shooter and an exclusive Wii title as well. The game has you play as Scott as he prepares to meet the father of Miyu, his fiancé. However instead Scott is caught up in-between a gang war, as it turns out that his fiancé's father is infact a Yakuza boss himself. So with Miyu captured and her father's mafia in crisis, it is up to Scott to save the day. As expected from a FPS, there is a lot of gun play from Red Steel and Ubisoft have done a good job of making the action packed fighting in the game much more entertaining. There are tons of explosions lots of guns and tons of baddies to mow down as you battle them throughout the streets of Tokyo.
Its surprising how more enjoyable the game becomes with a simple change in control method and its largely why Red Steel works so well as a Wii game. Red Steel is an engaging shooter and its thanks to such great controls where you literally point the wiimote to aim and shoot that this is possible. Another reason it is such a mesmerising experience on the Nintendo Wii is because of the one-on-one duels that the player has to take part in later on in the game. These fights are interesting as there is a lot of depth and precision to them. You can block attacks, parry attacks, do horizontal sweeps, vertical sweeps, make striking attacks and perform combos that make use of both of the weapons you fight with during the game.
When you win duels as well you're given the option to either kill your enemy or spare them which'll reward you honour points instead. Further in the game, you're given the option as well to improve your skills and unlock new weapons. You can even disarm enemies with your gun by slowing down time and firing at places like the hands and flicking the wiimote up and down to force the baddies to drop their guns onto the floor. You can also tactically take down foes by targeting their leader and forcing him to surrender which causes the group to surrender as well.
Besides that Red Steel is also a visually appealing title and the semblance of Red Steel is evident and impressively embodied into the game's story and themes of the game itself. The neon menus alone are lavish. There is a lot of detail in the levels and the comic style presentation is excellent stuff overall thanks to some cool screen effects only sadly married to some moments of slowdown. Although Red Steel has its fair share of flaws too. There are a few glitches which involve the occasional flashing pixel and occasions when the wiimote sticks. Also, Red Steel can at times become a repetitive game as it doesn't feature much diversity in the gameplay itself from the gunplay and few sword fights.
This repetitive playability of Red Steel continues to increase as the game develops as well with enemies becoming cheaper and missions becoming less fun to play as a result. This is a problem especially during the duels that often require you to simply do no more than parry attacks. The sword fighting itself doesn't perform as you'd might expect either and it plays more like a turn based battle than a real dual against someone. At times the actual execution of moves can be too difficult to pull off which can be infuriating on some parts of the game.
Lastly, Red Steel has an uninspired cast of voices and the soundtrack is forgettable at best, which is a shame as well because it makes the weak story of the game even less convincing and immersive which is a darn shame. Regardless, that isn't a massive problem despite anything else. On the whole Red Steel is a sign of things to come on Nintendo Wii, being one of the first great games you can buy on the system that isn't by Nintendo. It is a reasonably long game for a shooter and would take around a few weeks to finish without seeing into the side missions, multiplayer or anything else like it. It has flair; some cool shootouts and probably couldn't be done the same on any other console.
