Red Steel (Wii) (gamespy)

- gamespy -

When we saw the tech demo of Red Steel, we were very optimistic about it. Since it was our first taste of the Wii at work, we were suitably impressed with the tech demo, which was essentially a shooting gallery running on a GameCube developers' kit. We then played it at E3, but kept running into problems with Nintendo's booth attendant kicking us off the machine. When we tried it out in New York, we were less than impressed with it. Finally, some six weeks ago, we played a near-final build and enjoyed it a bit more than New York. Still, no matter how you cut it, Red Steel is the kind of launch game that should fall into bargain bins around game stores worldwide without a peep, and deservingly so.

The game starts off in Los Angeles. Players will take on the role of Scott, a bodyguard who falls in love with the girl he's supposed to protect. When the game starts, he's meeting his girlfriend's father to ask for her hand in marriage. Little does he know, Sato, his future father-in-law, is one of the most powerful heads of the Yakuza back home in Tokyo. During this trip to LA, Yakuza thugs decide to kidnap Scott's girlfriend and attempt to kill Sato. That's when Scott picks up a gun and starts blasting away. Along the way, players will end up in Japan fighting off a variety of gangsters and being a gaijin badass.

Sound pretty generic? It is. Really. The aiming and targeting system are wonky, even wonkier than what we played last month, with occasional flickering of the reticule onscreen. Even after adjusting the sensitivity both on the Wii hardware and within the game's options, nothing stays constantly on target. Turning is even worse. After playing other first-person shooters on the Wii, it's safe to say that Ubisoft Paris has used a different approach to the genre. More often than not, a game that should be a fairly run-of-the-mill shooter becomes a game of duck, guess, and cover. It's not because the A.I. is so smart that players have to use plenty of cover, or that the experience is subtly intricate. It's more because the controls are so clumsy and awkward that no one will be able to survive a gunfight if he or she is caught between two gunmen. With no 180 turn or any quick way to spin around and shoot, the most basic of firefights becomes a death march.

Speaking of death marches, although players can recover by ducking and hiding, when they are unfortunate enough to be killed, they'll be treated to a loading screen and a return to the last checkpoint. In one level, an airport hangar, it can mean the return to the beginning of the stage and a tedious and poorly written scene that the player can't skip. Also, there were some points during cutscenes in which the subtitles were chopped off on my 16:9 display. Cardinal sins, all of them.

Scott will also engage in lots of swordfighting. While this seems like a cool idea to incorporate the Wii Remote into gameplay, it's both completely contrary to the plot, and clumsy in execution. First off, anyone who's seen Raiders of the Lost Ark knows that if there's a guy waving a big sword at you, shoot him! That aside, there's supposed to be some sort of rhyme and reason to swordfighting. Instead, players can wave the remote around, and eventually (through the miracle of dumb luck?), they will likely topple their opponent. After a certain point it gets tougher, but it feels more like the enemies just take more damage before submitting. At some point, theoretically, the sword should double as a melee weapon, although once opponents get close enough, the player won't be able to swing the Nunchuk in time to slice a gunman. Instead, they'll more likely reload on accident and find themselves right back at that loading screen, waiting to start from the last checkpoint.

Visually, Red Steel resembles a GameCube launch title, with generic characters abounding. There are also bugs, such as in the final LA level, during which gangsters started floating up the screen while shooting. This was on a retail copy of the game. Also, while the game is rated "T," which explains the muted violence compared to most first-person shooters, it defies logic, physics, and just plain good game design to have a system in which players can shoot someone from a fairly close range with a shotgun and not take them out. Forget the fact that they shouldn't have a face after a blast at close range; a group of guys can be standing next to a car, and even if players pump enough lead into the vehicle to cause an explosion, the numerous thugs and gangsters flooding the level will practically need to be ghost riding the whip to die in the ensuing combustion.

If there's anything positive that can be said about Red Steel, it's an optimistic hope that someone will take the basic idea and mechanics of this game and find a way to build upon them to create a better title for the Wii. In the game's defense, the sniper rifle mechanic works very well. Arm movements give the sensation of a more manual approach to controlling the zoom. It's proof that the first-person shooter is a genre that can be done with the parameters of this system. Players reload their gun by shaking the Nunchuk. To open doors and interact with the environment, they will do the same. They'll fire their guns with the B button, which resembles a trigger of sorts.

After the initial LA levels, the action will move to Japan, where players will learn how to use their gun to disarm opponents. If the game were incorporated with some form of physics and slightly more realism in regard to guns, stopping power, and environmental interactions (explosives on each level), it would shine much more. Anyone playing it can absolutely see the potential here for a good game; it's just that this product should have had much more time in the oven before it was unleashed on the public.

The game also features split-screen multiplayer for up to four people. However, it's fairly uninspired, and at points is mostly reminiscent of GoldenEye on the Nintendo64, although mostly in the "been there, done that" sense of maps, characters and modes, and not in the fun factor. It's pretty much the afterthought that people would think it would be.

There has been criticism on both sides of the fence. There are those who feel that Red Steel has a steep learning curve that takes some getting used to. There are then people such as myself, who attribute such statements to fanboydom, console launch fever, or buyer's remorse. All of the aforementioned could be considered impairments of judgment. It's a broken, buggy game, and if the statement about learning curves were true, it would still take far too long to gain wings before the average gamer would grow disenfranchised. The game feels completely rushed to retail in time for the launch.