Red Steel is a first person shooter with occasional sword fights. A good idea on paper, but doesn't meet its potential.
User Rating: 6 | Red Steel WII
Red Steel is a first person shooter with occasional sword fights which is controlled with the nunchuk and remote. You play as an American bodyguard and are ready to meet your fiancee's father for the first time, who happens to be the leader of a Japanese gang. Unfortunately, on this day they are attacked by a rival gang and your fiancee is kidnapped in the process. From here, you chase down your attackers and head over to Japan. The graphics are extremely bland and dated and in some areas it can be really hard to see distant targets which is particularly frustrating when some enemies are armed with sniper rifles. Luckily, your character can zoom-in which helps spot distant foes and to snipe them regardless of the gun, although some guns are better at zooming in than others. You eventually acquire a power to pause time where you can pick multiple targets to gun down rapidly. Shooting the guns out of their hands when using this power causes them to surrender for extra 'respect' points. The enemies aren't too tough which is a good thing since this allows you to get used to the controls, and your health regenerates automatically like the shields in games such as Halo. The controls take a while to get used to but work reasonably well. Shaking the nunchuk reloads weapons and opens doors, but often doesn't seem to register unless you do it quite aggressively. You can carry two weapons at a time and switch between them using the d-pad. The sword fights initially sounded like a great reason to purchase the game, but in practice often last a bit longer than I would like since they slow down the action and aren't too fun anyway. In these fights, you use the nunchuk to control your broken sword which acts as a shield, and control your katana with the remote. You can parry normal attacks but the strong attacks you must dodge using the C-button and control stick. You can slash by swinging the remote and other types of attacks can be learned as you progress the game. The sword fights can feel a bit sluggish and unresponsive though which can be a bit of a frustrating experience. Overall, it feels like the developers have taken an old FPS, added a new control scheme to it and added some sword fights for good measure. It may have sounded a good idea, but wasn't implemented to its full potential. Hopefully, a similar game in the future could perfect both the idea, and the controls.
