Red Steel, Red Steel, Red Steel. You looked so good when I first saw you at E3. I was looking forward to shelling out $50 on launch day to get my hands on you. Red Steel and Twilight Princess, THOSE were the two games I was really looking forward to when the Wii came out. On the day I camped out to get my Wii though, I only had $330 to spend. Enough money for Twilight Princess and the Wii.
After spending a week playing Red Steel from renting it at Blockbuster, I've never felt so lucky.
This game is a sore disapointment. I even lowered my expectations after seeing the second tech demo of it at E3. I wasn't expecting for the katana to completely mimic the movements of the Wiimote. I wasn't expecting a completely gripping storyline, or PS3-rivaling graphics, or even a revolutionary phyiscs engine. What was I expecting from Red Steel?
A solid shooter with fluent controls, which would make decent use of the new Wii technology. Something that was innovative, but didn't need to be revolutionary, just a decent shooter that made good use of the Wii controls.
Red Steel failed to deliver, even on those humble expectations.
For one thing, the control scheme has too many bad flaws. I wasn't expecting anything that would be completely tight or accurate like a Mouse and Keyboard, but Red Steel's aiming system was just too twitchy and BUGGY. The aiming reticle would just randomly teleport to the center of the screen, which proved to be more than frustrating. Also, turning in the game seemed to be far too slow, making moving around more difficult than it should.
The worst part of it definitely would come to how the aiming reticle would move around erraticaly for no reason. In Twilight Princess, aiming with the bow proves to be completely accurate. Flawless. In Red Steel, it's nearly impossible to get an accurate shot off on an enemy. Sure, sometimes you can do it, but that's only after the enemy has completely stopped moving and you've spent a good 10 seconds focusing yourself onto that specific target.
The targeting "Lock On" system was also dreadfully difficult. I gave up on trying to use it. You can focus on an enemy like you can in the Scarface video game by holding "A" on the Wiimote. To zoom in, you lean the controller closer to your screen, and to zoom out you pull it backwards. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Zooming in and out using this method proves to be sluggish and choppy, often making your more inaccurate than before. Also, focusing on an enemy this way will completely lock you out of seeing other enemies, who will be more than happy to kill you while your fumbling over trying to get a decent body-shot on one enemy.
Which brings me to another point. The health system. For some weird reason, your character can automatically heal himself just by not getting shot at for a period of 10 seconds. That means you can get riddled with uzi bullets to near death one moment, but then be completely fine after ducking under a table for 10 seconds. While a good concept, most of the guns that the enemies use in Red Steel will obliterate you within 2 - 3 consecutive shots. Unless you can see where ALL your enemies are at at ALL times, you'll find yourself dying. More often than you want to, you'll finish up slaughtering 10 enemies with your pistol only to be leveld by two shots from a shotgun that came from some punk that was hiding behind a box in the far left corner behind you.
It proves to be frustrating, especially during levels when enemies have sniper and assualt rifles. Half of the time you'll take two steps into a new area and die from having NO idea where the enemy was shooting from.
Lucky for you though, the AI of each enemy seems to be modelled after a 6-year old crack addict with down syndrom.
Enemies are stupid. They'll take cover, they'll shoot at you. They'll run out into the open in at a really slow speed. Sometimes they won't even attack you, they'll just glitch out and stand around waiting for you to shoot them in the face. Hell, some enemies will just glitch out completely - especially when you try to make them submit.
Oh, what's submit?
Red Steel incorporate a Bullet Time system. You freeze time for a few seconds, letting you have the choice to either get a quick instant-kill shot on an enemy, or shoot the weapon from the enemie's hands to make them surrender. To do this, shoot the gun in an enemy's hand and then motion up and down on the controller to make them bow down and drop it. To which they'll magically disapear. Big problem with this?
Sometimes when you make an enemy submit, they don't just magically disapear. They glitch out completely, standing back up and following you around staring at you like a lost puppy under the influence of crystal meth. They'll even hold their hands like they're holding a gun, except there wont be anything in their hands. Theres absolutely NOTHING you can do to get them away, besides making it to the next part of the level (where they'll just magically disapear). You can shoot them, you can stab them, you can jump through windows....and they'll keep following you.
Wanna hear another sad thing? That's just one major bug out of many .
Red Steel has more bugs than a rotting corpse, and enough clipping issues to make the original Doom look cutting edge.
Enemies will glitch out in various different ways, and sometimes they'll just run through random things as if they didn't exist. Things like boxes, flaming heaps of metal, and stools. They like to ESPECIALLY do this during sword fights. Which, sadly enough, proves to be one of 2 "Pros" Red Steel has.
The sword fighting is Red Steel's strongest feature. It's solid, immersive, and offers the ability for the player to do different combos. Even then, it isn't completely perfect. Some of the more advanced Kata's require you to do absolutely precise movements with the Wiimote, which you'll often fail on unless you do the movements in completely straight lines. Also, the sword fights do not nearly last long enough, and once you figure out the enemy's attack pattern they become far too easy. Most of the time they just seem mediocre and almost "tacked in", just to provide a break away from the horrendous shooting action.
Another problem with the sword fighting? No Multiplayer support for it! That's right, NO TWO PLAYER SWORD FIGHTING. I could understand no four player sword fighting, but those who were looking forward to having online katana duels or even just simple duels with a friend will be sorely disapointed. If Ubisoft had taken the time to add this feature to the game, it would've been alot better.
Besides that, the graphics are actually somewhat decent. For a Wii game, anyway. The bloom and lighting effects make some areas look asethetically appealing, and they definitely do good justice to the styles of Japan. Characters lack any sort of facial detail though, and often make very choppy movements. The cinematic presentation is also not impressive at all, taking too many elements from the comic-like cut scenes from Max Payne, but without adding any unique stylings to it.
The only other good feature of this game would be the musical composition. The tracks are all very catchy and I might consider downloading the OST sometime in the near future.
Overall though, Red Steel easily proves to be one of the biggest disapointments in 2006. The real problem lies in that the game easily has the potential to be a great game. Had Ubisoft just spent a few more months developing the aiming system better and smoothing out all the horrible bugs, Red Steel could have been an enjoyable First Person Shooter.
As it stands though, Red Steel fails to deliver anything fun or exciting. The game also has a bland 8 hours of total game play for the single player mode. 8. Hours. Currently though, I suggest all those pondering whether or not they should buy Red Steel to warrent it a quick rental. Currently, the game is nowhere near worth it's $50 price tag, only providing a few hours of awkward game play laced with bugs, with a mediocre multiplayer system.
4 / 10
I bought Zelda, Monkey Ball, and Red Steel on launch day. Red Steel was the ONLY one to disappoint. You're so lucky you rented it first!
All of my friends are telling me how bad RedSteel is. After reading this, I suddenly have an urge to rent the game to experience it's nasty bugs and aiming system.