The protagonist's hand tilts just as you tilt your hand in real space,
holding your pistol with dat gangsta grip. Where you wave, your gun
aims. You pull the B-button "trigger" on the Wii remote and gunfire
erupts on-screen. It all seems so intuitive and natural. But then you
try turn to defend yourself against someone coming from your left, and
it happens so slowly that it's as if you're in a restrictive neck
brace. You try to combat an enemy with your katana blade with graceful,
weaving strikes - only to see single, barbaric swings. And every once
in awhile, you'll bump into an enemy that doesn't see you, hear you or
fire upon you.
This is what it's like to play the rushed mess that is Ubisoft's Red
Steel, the much-hyped and commercially successful launch title for
Nintendo's Wii.
Red Steel is primarily a first-person shooter with the occasional
one-on-one sword duel thrown in for good measure. You assume the role
of Scott, bodyguard and now-fiancée to the daughter of a Japanese mob
boss. What was supposed to be a warm dinner with your lady love, Miyu,
and her father Sato, ends up being a betrayal by one of Sato's
power-hungry underlings. Miyu is taken hostage, Sato is wounded, and
you set off to guide Sato to safety before planning just how you're
going to complete your rescue mission. You're given the ultimatum to
hand over the Katana Giri - a sword and a symbol of power in Sato's
clan - if you're to get Miyu back unharmed. So, Sato blesses you with
the blade before he succumbs to his wounds.
There you have it - a hero with a gun and sword in hand, and the
perfect excuse for Ubisoft to demonstrate what players can do with the
revolutionary Wii remote. Sword fighting and gun slinging certainly
sounds like - and starts off as, for the opening hour at least - a fun
time and a healthy variety of gameplay. Ultimately, though, neither of
these experiences make for a compelling game overall. The core
mechanics of shooting your gun seem simple enough, with the on-screen
reticule responding to your movement as would a laser pointer in a
lecture hall. If you've mastered using the remote to navigate through
your Wii channels, you'll have no trouble adjusting to firing weapons.
Poking the remote forward allows you to zoom in closer for a better
shot, and while this takes a few tries to get used to, it ends up being
serviceable. Weapons are the standard mundane fare of pistols, shotguns
and assault rifles, and pack a decently satisfying punch when you fire
them. You can also lob or roll grenades with the appropriate pantomime
using the nunchuk attachment.
The problems settle in when you need to free-look to face enemies above
you, below you, to the left and to the right of you. Turning about is
achieved by jamming your aiming reticule towards the edges of the
screen in the direction you wish to look, but the maximum turning speed
is way too slow to be of optimal use. At its best, the turning speed is
familiar to those used to dual-analog first-person shooters. At its
worst, the slow turning will reward you by getting you hit a few times
before you can even squeeze off a shot. The game seems to try and
compensate for this with enemy placement that borders on light-gun-game
simple, but this only serves to take away the all-angles excitement
that you normally get in shooters - especially when coupled with other
problems that drag the gunplay down.
See, the opposition can be downright dumb. The artificial intelligence
was hyped to have enemies knocking over tables to take cover. However,
practical experience shows that enemies rarely try to sneak off and
flank you, or even close in on you. Usage of cover is spontaneous, as
you'll often see gunmen stand out in the open firing at you - even as
you speedily sidestep towards them for the close-range shotgun blast.
Your opponents don't seem to run from grenades as often as they should
- though, since your "tossing" motions with the nunchuk might
mistakenly result in a grenade being rolled along the ground and vice
versa, perhaps you won't end up using grenades enough for this to
matter.
At least Ubisoft tries to make up for this by introducing some
interesting concepts. You eventually gain the ability to freeze the
world around you for a limited amount of time. You can then point and
click at spots on the screen that you'll instantly fire upon, in
succession, once you unfreeze time. Usually this results in almost
guaranteed deaths for your assailants; but if you aim for their weapons
instead of their heads, you can coerce them into surrendering with a
simple "on your knees" gesture with the remote - earning you "Respect
Points". You'll encounter situations where you might miss some of their
weapons, and it's a little ridiculous to watch guys slowly surrender as
their cohorts continue to fire at you. However, almost every group of
thugs has a leader, and if you force the leader to surrender the entire
crew follows suit. This is the easiest way to pile up the respect while
simultaneously saving yourself ammo and frustration.
The respect points you accumulate can be spent at a dojo in between
missions to learn special moves for sword combat. Unfortunately, when
you consider the basics of sword combat, these moves are almost
pointless. The most obvious gripe with the swordplay is that your blade
doesn't respond naturally to your movements. Instead, any quick swipe
with the remote results in an on-screen slash aimed in the general
direction of your motions. Try slashing left and right rapidly and
you'll see your sword awkwardly complete successive right-to-left
slashes, which appear choppy and not at all in sync with your
movements. You can't stab with your sword either - even though your
opponents can - further limiting the amount of moves you can perform.
You can parry strikes with your shorter sword by swinging your nunchuk,
which does involve some tricky timing and at least adding some
challenge to sword battles. However, your movement is locked to
left-and-right sidestepping around your opponent, whose strikes are all
heavily telegraphed.
Furthermore, every sword battle is pre-scripted. You can't whip out
your sword whenever you feel like it, and you can't choose to end the
duel dishonorably by whipping out your pistol. The ultimate result is
less a graceful samurai battle and more a fixed, timing-based,
bludgeoning affair that resembles a poor man's Punch-Out!! more than it
does Samurai Shodown. At least for a short while, it can be sort of fun
to swing around the Wii remote for a few battles before the limitations
turn the experience into monotony. And, upon winning a sword battle,
you're able to choose to forego striking the killing blow, earning even
more respect points for showing mercy.
But are special moves and combos even worth spending the effort to
compile respect points for? Pulled off with either a simultaneous swipe
of your nunchuk and remote, or a series of individual slashes in
alternating directions, these attacks require such precise timing and
motions that you'll be hard pressed to successfully hit your enemies
during their small windows of vulnerability. You're better off just
flailing away with generic swipes. Sure, special moves cause a little
more damage and earn you even more respect points - but the aggravation
really just isn't worth it. Worse, completing the purchase of these
moves at the dojo requires you to "learn" them by successfully
performing them three times. There is no way to "cancel" your purchase,
so with some of the moves being almost impossible to pull off even
once, you might find yourself either sitting there for minutes on end
or rolling your eyes as you reset your Wii.
Laughable bugs round out the rushed gameplay experience. On several
occasions you might find yourself walking in on enemies with their arms
outstretched still in their "Vitruvian Man" positions, a pose used for
all 3D character models during the development process. Whether the
positioning of these enemies was unfinished or the game forgot to "turn
them on", the result is just sloppy. In other instances, enemies won't
even detect you - even when you're clearly in their line of sight. Yet
another bug has an enemy cycle through his "ready to fire" and "idle
stance" poses until you take a potshot at him. Don't be surprised if an
enemy all of a sudden stops firing at you and freezes in his current
pose, his weapon completely disappears from the screen, and your shots
simply pass through him as through thin air. Another lovely defect
results in a schizophrenic aiming reticule, as if the Wii remote's IR
sensors are being confused by multiple lights.
The aesthetic presentation seems equally rushed, marked by
inconsistencies in both sound and visuals. The music in the game is
decent enough, with an eclectic mix of Oriental instruments and urban
beats. Yet, the dialogue and voice acting is poor enough to have come
from a low-budget Power Rangers rip-off. You're called a "Murderer!!!"
by groups of henchmen trying to gun you down, as if you're the only one
with a mean streak. An overweight thug with jheri-curls and gold chains
accosts you with a baseball bat, telling you that he'll "teach you to
respect private property" in a voice that can be only described as
Keanu Reeves after graduating finishing school. The Keanu Wannabe
returns to voice another "gangsta" thug's line, "Give me a good
old-fashioned gangster movie! Not this wire-fu crap!" You learn your
time-freezing ability from a man who tells you that "Ninjas can stop
time! Really! It's true!" as if trying to win a "pirates versus ninjas"
debate. The gems keep coming, and the camp is endless.
The visuals are a mixed bag as well; to be fair, it should be said that
the best of the visuals are truly beautiful. They are arguably the best
part of the game. Most notable is the dojo environment - while walking
the path leading to the entrance, look down and you'll see sharp and
detailed ground textures with shining stones composing the walkway.
Just inside the dojo doors, look to the right and you'll see martial
arts students perform katas through a glass window - complete with
convincing glass-ripple effects. In warehouses, you can see the
sunlight streaming through the windows, illuminating the floors with
subtle hints of light bloom. Look carefully and you'll notice heat
waves and depth-of-field effects in some spots. It also bears
mentioning that exploding forklifts look cool, basking the screen in a
cathartic, orange glow. But all of these fine qualities are juxtaposed
against mostly-generic looking enemies, almost all of whom have this
strange glossy sheen about them. For every sharp, detailed texture in
the game, there must be tens of muddy, splotchy ones. You might also
notice that the game is completely devoid of the titular "red". Finish
this bloodless game and you'll have wielded one of the cleanest katana
blades in all of history. Finally, watch out for the glitchy rag-doll
physics that leave some enemy corpses twitching uncontrollably -
sometimes in mid-air. It's an inconsistent visual experience that,
while decent overall, further adds to this game's unpolished nature.
The multiplayer in Red Steel continues the trend of potentially
innovative ideas that get mired in clumsy execution. In this case, all
of the awkwardness stems from the core gameplay itself. Your simple
deathmatch options are enhanced by some intriguing modes that include
listening to your Wii remote speaker to "pick up missions" as if
answering your cell phone - never mind that your opponents can clearly
hear what's being dictated to you. There's no sword fighting either,
which is a blessing or a curse depending on how you see it. On the one
hand, it strips multiplayer of one of this game's key "features". On
the other hand, you can rest assured that you won't be emulating the
ridiculous Red Steel advertisements that depict four friends wildly
waving their arms about. Whether or not the multiplayer will add any
substantial amount of play time to the approximately eight hour
single-player campaign depends on how much you can tolerate the game's
mechanical shortcomings.
Red Steel ends up being an over-hyped disappointment that wastes its
potential. There are novel ideas that could shine with proper
execution, and given more time, perhaps Ubisoft can craft a much more
polished sequel. The game at least looks alright on the whole, and
taken in spurts, downing enemies can provide some minimal amount
cathartic fun as long as you don't think too hard about its warts. But
that's the problem - the issues and sloppy overall execution can simply
be too overbearing to be ignored, and ultimately Red Steel is a
treasure trove of missed opportunities that is good for a curious
rental at best.
