Ubisoft went virtually radio silent after it debuted Red Steel 2 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last year. Our lack of coverage over the game since then wasn't by our choice: we loved what we saw out of the Wii Motion Plus sequel in its early form, and have been aching to play more of it after its E3 premiere. Red Steel 2 is being prepped for a late March release in the US, and in anticipation of the game's launch, Ubisoft held a demo for the game earlier this month where we could play through the early parts of the near finished first person adventure.
Now, I say "adventure" and not "shooter" simply because, like Metroid Prime – the game that coined the First Person Adventure namesake – Red Steel 2 is less about "shooting" than it is "everything else." You'll be hopping ledges, climbing ladders, flipping switches and other non-shooting elements. Ubisoft told me at the demo that you could pretty much play the entire game without drawing your gun, and I can certainly see how that can be the case in my early run through. I, of course, did draw my gun to headshot a few baddies with a satisfying "kerbang!", but to be honest there are far more opportunities for swordplay in Red Steel 2 and, well, it's just a lot more fun swinging the remote to slam bad guys into submission.
If you haven't been following the Red Steel 2 deal, here's a refresher. First, other than having the same name, Red Steel 2 has nothing to do with the launch title Red Steel. The game has its own story, its own lead character, and its own universe: a unique East meets West crossbreeding of samurais and cowboys. Oh, and the world has an abundance of futuristic technology. Second, this game requires the Wii Motion Plus peripheral. It won't work without it: the sword play and part of the first-person shooter controls depend on the higher sensitivity of the Nintendo peripheral.
In Red Steel 2 you play as a nameless swordsman, the last member of a clan known as the Kusagari. After being dragged through the desert by the Jackal clan, you rush back to find your katana and exact your revenge. As you work your way through the missions you'll learn more about your clan as well as the Jackals, including the quest for a stolen Katana.
The gameplay itself is similar to the original, but everyone was asking the question while I was playing it: does it play as badly as the original Red Steel? And no offense to those who actually liked the first game in the series, but that title suffered from "Launch Title-itis," and the control was, honestly, kind of crummy. That's not surprising since developers had very little time to fine-tune Wii pointer and motion controls for their first-gen Wii titles. Red Steel 2, thankfully, does not suffer from these problems.
You might not dig the controls in their default settings, but luckily right from the start you have access to a totally in-depth options menu to tweak the controls to suit your tastes. You can tweak the speed of rotation and vertical look, adjust the size of the pointer's dead zone, and loosen up the sensitivity of the Wii Motion Plus. There's even a setting for "off screen rotation" where the Wii Motion Plus will continue to calculate how far you're pointing away from the sensor bar, and enable you to speed up the rotation even faster. Any time you kick over to the options menu you can see, in real time, your adjustments in a neutral territory so you don't have to worry about interrupting a mission or whether you'll get killed because you wanted to tighten up the pointer controls.
The Wii Motion Plus noticeably spices up the swordplay. Not only does it recognize horizontal and vertical swipes as well as direct stabs forward, it recognizes subtle and hard attacks depending on how fast you're swiping the Wii remote. In fact, there are enemies within Red Steel 2 that require hard attacks to break their armor before you can take them down proper – wimpy slashes won't have any effect until their shielding is gone.
The sword swinging isn't exactly 1:1 like it is in Wii Sports Resort, but this is something we knew about since the E3 demo: the way the game's designed, you slash the remote and then the game calculates what you did and represents it as an attack a split-second later. It seems like something like this would be ripe for lag, but it feels pretty natural and you really won't even notice the millisecond between controller slash and on-screen attack.
Now I wish I could say that it was flawless, but it isn't. In my early playthrough some attacks were represented as stabs and diagonal slashes couldn't decide between horizontal or vertical. And the finisher moves – the gesture attacks you make after an enemy's been weakened – are clearly using old-school Wii remote motions because they can be faked in a different direction than what the attack requires. For example, there will be a "downward slash" gesture icon over a weakened foe, but you can activate the finisher by swiping upwards – it's only looking for motion in these instances, not the specific direction.
But even though it's still not a perfect Wii Motion Plus product, it is still a very fun game with good, tight control where it counts. The lock-on technology keeps the action snappy by keeping your character pointed to the closest threat, so you can take him down without focusing too much on camera aiming. The developers implement some decent tech to keep players looking forward even when pulling the remote away from the screen to swipe the sword: the reticule will shift from its "aim" target to a simple dot when you're slashing the Wii remote, locking the camera so that before and after an attack the viewpoint doesn't stray from the action.
I was only allowed to plow through the first few missions, but these at least show the variety of levels and the balance and variety they have. In some you'll just have to take down waves of bad guys from the other clan, while in others you'll have to seek out their trucks and blast them out of commission. Along the way you'll find crates, barrels, bottles and other items that can be opened and smashed for cash, and you'll turn this extra money into additional moves and weapon upgrades. There are even hidden treasures like Sheriff Stars tucked away that'll earn you even more money. And performing special moves on downed foes increase the amount of cash they'll drop.
And I definitely have to say that the game looks great. The 3D engine runs at 60 frames per second almost the entire time (the developer said that I might see a drop when there are more than a half dozen enemies on the screen, but so far so good), and the cel shaded style works extremely well for the game's fictional Samurai Cowboys with Technology universe. The voice acting is a bit hit or miss during the pre-rendered cutscenes, but I've certainly heard far worse in other big-budget productions.
Red Steel 2 is set for release in late March, and while I still have a ways to go in this adventure, I think it's pretty safe to tell you to put this one on your radar. This looks like it could be one of the top Wii games of the year.
The Wii Motion Plus noticeably spices up the swordplay. Not only does it recognize horizontal and vertical swipes as well as direct stabs forward, it recognizes subtle and hard attacks depending on how fast you're swiping the Wii remote. In fact, there are enemies within Red Steel 2 that require hard attacks to break their armor before you can take them down proper – wimpy slashes won't have any effect until their shielding is gone.
The sword swinging isn't exactly 1:1 like it is in Wii Sports Resort, but this is something we knew about since the E3 demo: the way the game's designed, you slash the remote and then the game calculates what you did and represents it as an attack a split-second later. It seems like something like this would be ripe for lag, but it feels pretty natural and you really won't even notice the millisecond between controller slash and on-screen attack.
Now I wish I could say that it was flawless, but it isn't. In my early playthrough some attacks were represented as stabs and diagonal slashes couldn't decide between horizontal or vertical. And the finisher moves – the gesture attacks you make after an enemy's been weakened – are clearly using old-school Wii remote motions because they can be faked in a different direction than what the attack requires. For example, there will be a "downward slash" gesture icon over a weakened foe, but you can activate the finisher by swiping upwards – it's only looking for motion in these instances, not the specific direction.
But even though it's still not a perfect Wii Motion Plus product, it is still a very fun game with good, tight control where it counts. The lock-on technology keeps the action snappy by keeping your character pointed to the closest threat, so you can take him down without focusing too much on camera aiming. The developers implement some decent tech to keep players looking forward even when pulling the remote away from the screen to swipe the sword: the reticule will shift from its "aim" target to a simple dot when you're slashing the Wii remote, locking the camera so that before and after an attack the viewpoint doesn't stray from the action.
I was only allowed to plow through the first few missions, but these at least show the variety of levels and the balance and variety they have. In some you'll just have to take down waves of bad guys from the other clan, while in others you'll have to seek out their trucks and blast them out of commission. Along the way you'll find crates, barrels, bottles and other items that can be opened and smashed for cash, and you'll turn this extra money into additional moves and weapon upgrades. There are even hidden treasures like Sheriff Stars tucked away that'll earn you even more money. And performing special moves on downed foes increase the amount of cash they'll drop.
And I definitely have to say that the game looks great. The 3D engine runs at 60 frames per second almost the entire time (the developer said that I might see a drop when there are more than a half dozen enemies on the screen, but so far so good), and the cel shaded style works extremely well for the game's fictional Samurai Cowboys with Technology universe. The voice acting is a bit hit or miss during the pre-rendered cutscenes, but I've certainly heard far worse in other big-budget productions.
Red Steel 2 is set for release in late March, and while I still have a ways to go in this adventure, I think it's pretty safe to tell you to put this one on your radar. This looks like it could be one of the top Wii games of the year.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/107/1070807p1.html
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