A game can not be more forced than this one. The developers were bored after making the first level, and gave up...
Red Steel is a half-arsed attempt at making a Japanese-American gangster style shooter with some sword fighting. All the basic formulas for Red Steel, are done terribly.
You are a body guard, who just happens to have a rich girl friend whom you protect. She gets kidnapped, you try to save her by killing as many people as you possibly can. Why call the police? Thats the whole story, now the developers added filler content to make up for time, big mistake. Story gets boring after repetition of doing repetitive levels that are no different than the last.
There is a point in the game where you have like 3 choices of levels to take, so it gives you one option, but either way you do all levels and there is no perks to any of them.
The graphics look like the game cube's graphics, and not a next generation console. The guns don't look too bad, but each level is the same hallways and minor outdoor areas. The textures (or lack there of) are plain coloured walls, hardly any design to the buildings, which I thought gangsters loved fancy places.
The game play is actually the worst part of the game. The Wii's motion controls are very hard to make a game with, because your either going to be doing the same movements as every other game, or your controls won't work. Red Steel does both, or every other game just copied Red Steel... which is a bad thing. You point the Wii remote at the screen and shoot, which is not too bad, but when zooming in with a sniper you have to move your whole arm in so close to the TV your almost through the screen. Last I heard, Snipers don't move closer to their target to zoom in...
A main problem with shooting though is that there is no glitch detection when you are pointing the remote away from the screen. Many occasions your gun will start flipping out, and twitching everywhere, which during intense gun fighting (which is rare) is a pain.
One of the main features of this game are the sword fights, also the worst feature. The battles are forced at you, at the most irrelevant points in the game where your just like, "hmm I've got 2 minutes to escape, so why don't I shoot you?". You can not just choose to whip out your sword and hack through everyone, plus during the battles there are stupid intervals of the enemy backing away and stalling. Not only that, but if you just shake the Wii remote left to right vigorously for the duration of the fight, you win.
The voice acting is mediocre along with the artwork cut-scenes which have become very popular these days rather than real cut-scenes. Although with the lack of upgraded graphics on the Wii, whats the point? The guns sound good actually, and there is a good variety. Reloading sound fx sound kind of bad though, they sound like your playing a video game...
Red Steel is one of those games that gives the console it is on, a bad name. Do not rent Red Steel. Do not buy Red Steel, if you have it, take it back.