NerdMentality | Red Steel

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Red Steel

Posted February 8th 2007 by Gareth Trinkwon.

Poor Scott Monroe is having a bad day. During his trip to meet his fiancé's father, the building is attacked by a Yakuza gang and his fiancé is kidnapped. Armed only with whatever he can find at his disposal, it's his mission to travel all the way to Japan to rescue her from their clutches.

Red Steel is a game that had things going badly for it pretty much from the very beginning. The day it was unveiled at Nintendo's pre-E3 2006 press conference, there was a technical fault with the screen and footage was left blank for a good couple of minutes while the Ubisoft representative had to explain what the game was about. When the picture finally returned we were greeted with a somewhat average-looking game with a worryingly feel to it that probably resulted from the unusual Wii controller setup. We confirmed those suspicions on the E3 show floor the next day with a hands-on demo utilizing the new remote, but we were assured that the game's controls would be as functional and intuitive as Nintendo had promised.

Well, they aren't.

Obviously control is the biggest focus of the game. The Wii's entire justification for existing is its all-singing, all-dancing, all-motion-sensing capabilities. Games will attain new levels of fun and immersion by giving players the ability to jump right into their games and control them as intuitively as they would their own limbs. Well, that's the idea, anyway. The whole problem with Red Steel is that it doesn't really do this - at all.

The game's opening stage attempts to gently introduce you to the movement controls in a simple introductory sequence. Scott is given the all-important task of staring at fish swimming around in a big extravagant fish tank. You move the remote around the screen to focus on each fish. After staring at what seems like an endless amount of different fish, you're asked to move on and begin the game. You have to make your way down a corridor to meet up with another character, and this is where it becomes abundantly obvious that things are going to be a lot more tricky than previously thought. It was an absolute battle to get the character to face the right direction as you walked through the hallway. The bodyguards posted around the building must have thought I was totally wasted, stumbling down the corridor while looking at the floor and ceiling – and suddenly spinning uncontrollably. Perhaps it's a good thing that the games' A.I. isn't very good as it might be too much to handle.

As for the control setup itself, the remote is basically your gun. Aiming is performed by pointing around the screen, and the B button acts as your trigger. So, like a gun, that's pretty much all there is to it. The nunchuk add-on is kind of the game's "shift" button. Apart from its main uses in movement and sword fighting, which I'll cover in a moment, the nunchuk performs basic tasks such as reloading, picking up weapons and throwing grenades. The analog stick moves your character forward, backwards, left and right.

Easy, right? Well it is, but it just doesn't really work that well. The biggest problem with the game's controls lies in the turning. Your equipped weapon will track the cursor around the screen wherever you aim, and moving the cursor to the far sides makes your character turn or pitch his head in that direction. The trouble is that he turns too slowly, and you'll be instinctively trying to turn faster by pointing even further to the side of the screen. Don't do that. All it does is cause your remote to lose track of the sensor bar, and the game will throw you into an eternal spinning turnfest of doom.

The game does eventually become playable, however. After you've cleared two or three levels and gotten some practice, you should actually begin to get used to how the whole control setup works. You'll be able to dispatch enemies and take cover with much more ease than the drunken state you started out in. I've found shootouts have traditionally been far more engaging when you're facing the right direction, though. Still, the whole basis of the Wii is to showcase quick, easy, pick-up-and-play gaming. Red Steel is the absolute opposite of this, and being a genre that everyone knew straight from the beginning would be ideal for the Wii, it's disappointing.

That said, the game does remain fairly enjoyable throughout. If you keep a bead on the controls, the gun fights can be pretty fun. Unfortunately the game does feel a little scripted. Enemies are in pre-determined places, appear at pre-determined times, and react in pre-determined ways. On one hand it makes the game feel a lot more cinematic than it otherwise would have been, since the developers were free to trigger some intricate sequences to set up shoot outs. On the other, subsequent play throughs are going to feel all the more "seen this done that", knocking some points off of the replayability. First person shooters have never really been at the forefront of storytelling, but the tale of Scott traveling from Los Angeles to Toyko to become an American Samurai and rescue his fiancé is enough to keep you engaged throughout. But again, the moderate short length of the story mode, combined with the lack of surprise and inability to skip past torturous cutscenes work against it in terms of wanting to play through again.

Oh, and yes, the game does feature sword fighting. Each stage will have a few sections where the action stops and your character holsters his weapon and draws his Katana for an honorable sword fight with a fellow warrior. It's where the game draws its name, and it's a pretty good idea, but the controls definitely could have used some work. You won't be seeing the kinds of battles you see in the commercials, with Wii players fighting for their lives and swinging at invisible foes in front of their couch. Red Steel's sword moves are pretty much just replacements of standard button-presses with remote motions. The sword doesn't track your movement in any way, shape or form. The fights revolve around coordinating offensive sword slashes with defensive nunchuk blocks, as well as dodging by holding the Z trigger while moving. Additional sword techniques can be unlocked as you progress through the game, but I found that I only needed one or two to defeat most opponents. Personally, I would have preferred that they'd done away with the sword fighting entirely and stuck with the fast paced shooting action all the way through. It's just more fun.

As far as the presentation goes, it's about as average as everything else in the game. There was quite a bit of negative hype concerning the graphics prior to release. Gamers were asking how a next-gen first person shooter could possibly look like a fairly average Gamecube game. In all fairness, the graphics are actually kind of mixed. The overall look of the game is pretty poor. Muddy textures, low detailed models and some fairly jumpy animation populate the game's many environments. It looks almost like something from a high-end N64 or low-end Dreamcast game in places. On the other hand, the game has one of the most bullet-eractive (new word I just created) environments I've ever seen in a game. Shoot-outs in an office will wreak absolute havoc as bullets kick up dust, tear through desks, chairs, and computers while sending important documents flying through the air. It really does add a great element of realism and immersion to the gunfights, so kudos to the developers for that.

There are also a few areas of the game that do literally look stunning. Certain rooms and stages sport near perfect lighting, detailed geometry, an overall "cleaner" look, as well as some pretty amazing particle effects (such as smoke and fire). It's like Dorothy going from the nasty, dark, black and white scenes of Kansas and waking up in the colorful world of Oz. There's a sequence fairly early on in the game that has a warehouse office exploding shortly after you make your way through it. My jaw literally dropped at the sight of this pixel-perfect fire crashing through the windows and then billowing out realistically. It's just very bizarre that a game whose presentation, for the most part, is pretty average, to show brilliance now and then. Given more time, there might have been the opportunity to make the entire game look as great from start to finish.

The one part of the game that didn't really seem to suffer many hardships is the audio department. While voice acting is a little cheesy, sound effects are crisp and the buzz of bullets whizzing past your head is ever present throughout the game. The game also boasts a pretty rad Japanese-inspired soundtrack with peaceful string melodies for the laid back training stages, and fast-paced techno rock whenever the action picks up for gunfights. It's great at pumping you up during an action scene, and also serves the purpose of letting you know if a stray enemy is still on the loose. Things might look fine and dandy down that corridor, but if the music's still in ultra action excitement mode, better check again!

Slight Pulse - More like Red Aluminium.

Given more development time, Red Steel probably could have been the true Wii blockbuster that we'd hoped for. The game's flaws could have been cleared up, the control issues could have been remedied and the game could perhaps have gained a little more visual flair. As it stands, we have a fairly fun game that takes far too long to get to grips with, and provides little reward for doing so. If you see it selling cheap somewhere and don't have any plans for the weekend, by all means, check it out. Otherwise I'd suggest that you wait for the next high profile FPS. Perhaps they'll have ironed out the control issues by then.

Posted in: Reviews