Red Steel is a classic example of promising concept, but complete and utter failure in execution.
Red Steel has you playing as a gun-toting, katana-wielding gaijin - or American in English - named Scott, who has fallen in love with a girl named Miyu. Miyu is the daughter of Sato, a powerful boss of a clan known as the Sanro Kai, and is also engaged to Scott. The Sanro Kai holds a historic symbol of power, a sword known as the Katana Giri, and Miyu gets kidnapped and held for ransom. The price for her return is the Katana Giri, and Scott is entrusted by the Sanro Kai to bring back Miyu alive, and to paint the steel red with their blood.
The game features two main gameplay elements: gunplay, and swordplay. Unfortunately, both aspects of the gameplay are rather flawed. When you begin a level, you run around shooting using the remote to aim, the d-pad left or right to select one of two weapons, the d-pad down to prime a grenade, and the nunchuck control stick to move. There's a learning curve to be had here, though. In order to look around, you have to move the reticule either left, right, up or down, and if you have an enemy to any side of you that isn't relatively center, it can be a pain to line up your shot.
To help with aiming, you can press the A button to lock on to an enemy if you're pointing in his general direction. Once you lock on, a box will appear, and if you're aiming within the box, you'll most likely hit your target. You can move the remote closer to the screen to zoom in more, but again, there's a learning curve, because then the movement becomes so touchy, especially with the sniper rifle's scope. It's also rather cumbersome to lock on to a target when they're moving around corners, or when there are multiple enemies.
There is one gameplay feature during gun combat that comes in very handy, though, and that's focus time. Later on in the game, you'll be granted this ability that lets you freeze time and select your targets in real time. You'll have a meter that will fill up to a maximum half circle as you're shooting enemies. The faster you take them down, the faster it will fill up. Holding A and zooming in quickly will activate Focus Time, and releasing A will have Scott fire off all the shots you painted.
Once you're in Focus Time, one of the things you can do is target the enemy's firearm, and then shoot it to disarm them. After you've done this, a quick wave of the remote up and down makes them submit and drop their weapons. If you don't make them submit, they'll just go right back to firing at you. Every once in a while, there will be a leader among the group, and if you make him submit, the rest of the enemies should submit as well. Effectively, you can clear out an entire room of bad guys with one shot. Just as with everything else in the game, it's not perfect, and there will be times where some of the enemies won't submit along with their leader. This can catch you off guard, as you might think it's safe, but then you're sideswiped before you have a chance to get your health back.
Other basic controls involve flicking the nunchuck down to open a door, or to flip over a table for cover, but problems lay here as well. The nunchuck is used to pick up a weapon, but it's also used to reload, so there will be several times where you're trying to reload, but you pick up a different weapon on the ground instead. During heated firefights, that's a very unwanted mistake. You can also use the nunchuck to toss a grenade by flicking it downward, or rolling it along the ground by flicking it upward. Also, when you're in striking range, you can flick the nunchuck to melee a foe with your shortsword, but this very rarely works.
Every so often, the gunplay will be broken up by a duel. Scott holsters his gun and brandishes his katana when approaching a sword-wielding enemy. Basic horizontal and vertical swings of the remote will cause him to slash in those respective directions. When he obtains a shortsword, he'll attempt to parry if you flick the nunchuck. Holding down C will make him guard, where he can dodge left or right out of the way, and then flicking the nunchuck right after will make him lash out with the shortsword to attack the opponent's katana in an attempt to break it.
These segments are where the game really breaks down. They are the most frustrating parts of the game simply because the controls can be ridiculously unresponsive. Dodging and parrying work pretty well, but it's when you have an opening and try to capitalize on it that striking tends to fail. One particularly useful move called the Hammer Strike is used to unleash a devastating blow that does a lot of damage to their sword if they block, or to themselves if they're open. It's not really that useful when you can't pull it off half of the time.
Even at times when you're swinging the remote around blindly, Scott just might not do anything at all. You can also learn katas, or katana combos, but they very rarely work, and fail even easier as they're usually blocked before you can land the first strike. Frustration can really begin to build up when you know HOW to fight your opponent, but you can't beat him because you just can't pull off the moves. This results in many deaths that shouldn't have happened. You then usually resort to spamming a downward slash, which is the only thing you can get to work. It's really hard to stay mad at Ubisoft, though, because they had very little time to get used to the Wii to develop the system properly.
The game's pace when you're moving through the levels is hot and cold. Check points for the most part are well placed, but there are times where you have a long shooting session, and you have to fight two people with swords before you can get to a check point. These duels are usually where you die, so you then you have go through the shooting stages again. The levels also have a good amount of variety to them, and one mission in particular has you roaming around a carnival-like environment fighting enemies in silly costumes. There are also lulls in the pace when you visit the dojo or your friend's bar, but these are benefical areas of interest. You can learn new katana moves at the dojo, and by completing target practice sessions at the club, you can guns to your personal arsenal that you can stock up on before any mission.
Glitches really tend to drag down whatever enjoyment can be found in the game. One common occurance are random times where the aiming reticule will just start jumping around, making it very hard to stay on target. There are glitches where enemies will get stuck in ceilings and walls, or weapons will be placed in areas you can't reach. The game even has a crippling glitch where you'll pass through a wall and get stuck inside it, forcing you to restart the game. Red Steel unfortunately has fallen victim to having been a rush job with hardly any time to do some proper game testing and debugging.
Red Steel isn't much of a looker. The game's graphics are only passing for what the Wii can do, and failing for what's considered the standard for this generation. Playing on an HDTV will only make it worse, and because of the display ratio, you'll have to zoom in to have the game fill your screen from top to bottom. The colors are dull, the textures are blurry, and everything just needs to be modeled with more polygons. The animations are only average, even though they used motion capturing. There's a lot of distructable objects that can be blown apart, but again, it's just not that thrilling becaues of the game's mediocre graphics. There's even a couple of places where the frame rate dips to the point of almost unplayable.
The game fairs a little better in the audio department. The guns sound pretty much what you'd expect them to, and it's easily identifiable what guns they're shooting you with. The metal clanging of sword against sword sounds good enough, and the Wii remote even dispenses its own sound effects from its built-in speaker, which adds a nice touch. The soundtrack is fitting, but it's far from award winning.
The biggest offender audibly, though, is most certainly the voice acting. Everyone speaks with such horrible Japanese accents, you can't tell if they're genuinely making an attempt to sound authentic, or if they're making an offensive mockery of what Japanese people sound like when they're speaking English. What's even worse is the pronounciation is not consistent. Some words will be pronounced just fine, but other words will be totally slaughtered, and this applies to even some Japanese words! This has to be one of the worst voice acted games since Resident Evil.
Red Steel showed a lot of potential. Perhaps if it wasn't so rushed, it could have been much more fun. The gunplay, when you get the hang of it, is actually pretty fun, but the action truly suffers during the katana duels. If only Ubisoft had enough time to develop a better sword control system, those combat moments could have been really intuitive and engaging instead of clunky and offputting. Although it is pretty cool to watch Scott turn his gun in accordance with you turning the remote, it just isn't cool enough to forgive Red Steel's long rap sheet of offenses. Let's just hope Ubisoft learns from all their mistakes and has ample time to do everything right in their upcoming sequel.