Red Steel (Wii) Review

You probably know the story by now. An American man is about to meet his Japanese fiancée Miyu's father - who happens to be a Yakuza boss - to seek his approval for their upcoming marriage, but before the meeting can get underway, the restaurant is invaded by rival Yakuza gang members. Falling to the gunfire and left critically injured, your would-be father-in-law implores you to save his daughter as she is snatched away, thus beginning a hunt across the world, right from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Being both an American and a bodyguard, luckily you’re well trained in the art of gunplay, and your arsenal is added to by your acquiring of a katana, which you are hastily taught to use.

The first person shooter is one of the prime genres that people thought would be improved by the Wii Remote's pointer, and developers don’t seem to disagree, with three coming in the weeks including and following launch (the other two being Far Cry: Vengeance, also from Ubisoft, and Call Of Duty 3 from Activision). There's no arguing that Red Steel is the most publicised of the three, yet it has also come under the most fire from critics, particularly on the other side of the pond in the good old US of A. Strangely, it seems to have garnered mostly positive grades from Europe, giving us a direct split between the two continents.

Time for us to put our two pence into the debate, then. Let's make it clear: on this occasion, we stand firmly by our continent and must join the group with the positive impressions, which we’re sure may stir up a bit of controversy among those who have consistently viewing Red Steel negatively on this very site. See, Red Steel isn't as bad as some reviewers have been making out. However, it isn't as great as others have said, either. As a first attempt at a large budget exclusive FPS on a console with a brand new controller unlike ones we’ve seen before, it's impressive, but that’s not to say that there couldn’t have been a lot of improvement with more tweaking and testing.

The biggest talking point may as well be the one that we throw up first: how it controls. We could sum it up this way: works well, but could be better. For a start, the default sensitivity is way too low, and we had to set it to the highest possible to get turning and aiming to an acceptable level (i.e., so we weren’t getting killed every 15 seconds thanks to slow movement) – this sensitivity is supposedly for ‘experts’, but we found it pretty essential for it to be even playable. Once you’ve got that out of the way, though, turning is fine and moving the cursor to the edge of the screen to do so doesn’t feel bad at all – and yes, it is possible to circle strafe and things like that with relative ease after a little practice. Looking around and aiming are spot on most of the time thanks to the precision afforded by the remote – far easier than using a second analogue stick - and the nunchuk motions are implemented well, with a quick flick reloading your weapon, opening doors and activating control panels.

The sword battles are satisfying, and once you’ve gotten started you won’t even notice the lack of 1:1 sword motion. In fact, once you’ve begun a sword battle, you realise it really isn’t a very viable option in this game, and it makes sense for the blade to set itself back to a neutral position after you’ve performed a strike – it’s not even noticeable that the hits aren’t matching your swipes as it’s very easy to get into and to just immerse yourself in. The nunchuk again does well here, acting as the smaller parrying sword, with a jab in either direction to block oncoming blows.

There are but a few issues with control. Numero uno, occasionally the game will go bonkers and your viewpoint will rattle all over the show while your character spins to oblivion until you’ve corrected it with some pointing (it tends to be when you point off the screen for too long). Secondly, the walking speed feels very laboured at times, leaving you practically begging for a run button, or an option to speed up your steps. Trudging along moodily at the pace of a sleep-deprived snail really doesn’t match up to the urgency you’re supposed to be feeling at chasing up stairs in a multi-story car park to go after a car containing your fiancée’s bloody and injured father. Finally, the use of grenades and weapon switching feels very awkward mapped to the d-pad at first, but this one is eradicated fairly quickly after you’ve been playing for a while.

The gameplay is very interesting, in that it is clearly an FPS, yet it also seems to be completely different at the same time. Rather than walking around firing at opponents, it’s often best to find yourself suitable cover and stay in that spot during the entire shoot-out (you can kick tables over to hide behind, though confusingly you can only knock certain tables over – an inconsistency issue that spans a number of elements across the entire game, such as some glass being destructible, other panes apparently being completely invincible no matter what). Running around and shooting as you might in other first person shooters actually results in many more deaths than you could imagine, and so in this respect it sometimes feels more like a light-gun game than anything else during its shooting sections, which is backed up by huge amounts of enemies also moving into single places to hide and popping out in the style of Time Crisis, et al. Far from being a negative, this feels quite neat. Ducking down to take cover, popping up and firing off a few rounds from an uzi, ducking and running to new cover while avoiding stupid amounts of bullets (that are constantly whizzing past you) makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of an action film. The AI can be towards the stupid side every so often, but at least the bad guys know when to duck and not to reload when they’re staring right into the barrel of a gun. They pose a fair challenge, also helped by the sheer amount of them. Spoiler: loads.

Multiplayer is ace in an old-school Goldeneye kind of way, and the modes utilising the speaker are a good distraction. The only problem is the size of the levels – we imagine it’s not too bad when you’ve got four players running about the place, but with two people only it all feels very empty, and you can be wandering about for minutes without ever encountering your rival – much like XIII, another love it/hate it FPS from Ubisoft which shares many of the same style elements such as comic book storyboards, quite possibly thanks to, we believe, some of the same team working on Red Steel. The selection of characters is interesting to say the least, but we really wish Nintendo could have sorted out the online component to get this Internet-playable from day one. For now, though, we have a nice solid multiplayer FPS on Wii if you can get a few mates round.

We’ve all seen the first screenshots that came out of Red Steel, and how the graphical quality has been upgraded and downgraded randomly since the game’s unveiling. Disappointingly, the game does seem to follow the same pattern as the press coverage – some sections look fabulous, but others look like they were ripped from an average looking Gamecube game. On the other hand, we can tell you that the effects are generally better than many GC titles, with some impressive looking fire, water, reflections and trickles of light. One major nuance here is the issue of slowdown, which crops up a couple of times in the first few levels alone – one instance of which embarrassingly brings the Wii right down to a near halt, thanks to the game trying to load and stream new sections while simultaneously throwing effects about. It’s quite sad really – we know that Wii is twice as powerful as Gamecube, or thereabouts, so this sort of thing shouldn’t be happening at all with these slight visual improvements. It seemed to us to be more of an issue with programming than what the machine is capable of, but we really hope this kind of thing doesn’t start cropping up regularly in Wii games and hope it was a one off ‘oops, we missed that’ moment.

There’s a nice variety of fun music tinkering about as you’re playing, with some particularly adrenaline-pumping pieces during intense fights, both close-range and long-range. The voicework is a real let-down in direct opposition to this, with people clearly pretending to be Japanese all over the place. The introduction, wherein somebody charges into the restaurant all guns blazing screaming ‘fiercely’ made us laugh. Another case in point, the very start of the massage parlour level. The girl starts off sounding Japanese enough with a fair accent, but on her last sentence her voice somehow completely changes into a mix of French and American. This could’ve definitely used more work.

‘More work needed’ sums up Red Steel pretty accurately, actually. It’s a fun title that could warrant more than one play through for an action fix, but things like small control issues, graphical faults and terrible voicework build up and detract from the experience, chipping it down until it finds itself far from a bad game, but not up to the heights of brilliance that many were hoping for.