Review - Red Steel 2 Wii

kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
edited March 2010 in Gaming
gamestop wrote:
gamestop wrote:
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  • BE THE SWORDSMAN Embody a lonesome fighter, a man of few words with a shaded past full of mystery. Face various, and increasingly stronger, enemies and defeat challenging bosses in epic and intense fights.
  • IMMERSIVE EDGY WESTERN SETTING Visit various locations through a remote mixed metropolis in the middle of the American desert, where Eastern culture and Western culture have been smashed together into a hodge-podge jumble: Caldera. You will discover the game’s immersive background and environment as you make your way through the adventure.
  • UNIQUE PRECISION CONTROL OF YOUR WEAPONS WITH WII MOTIONPLUSTM The Wii MotionPlusTM provides 1:1 recognition where the sword and gun movements are precisely replicated within the game. Slash the villains the way you want! Plus Wii MotionPlusTM measures the power of your swing. The harder you swing the Wii Remote, the harder the sword swings in the game!
  • CLOSE COMBAT SYSTEM Feel like a powerful master swordsman and gunslinger thanks to the first-person-view that puts you in the middle of the action. Fight up to six enemies simultaneously and feel the power and freedom to use your sword or your gun at any time. Master numerous combos with your sword and your gun ranging from triggering exciting finishing kills, parrying enemy attacks, or even deflecting bullets with your sword!
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It's been a long wait but finally the Wii gets another good game. Graphically this game is impressive. It's a cell shaded vision of a modern asian/western style theme. Hell, it's samurais and cowboys riding Harley Davidson's in a run down setting featuring a pleasing mix of Wild Western/Asian themed music. If you are at all familiar with the movie The Good, The Bad, The Weird (and if you aren't familiar with this movie why the hell aren't you?) you'll have a fairly good grounding on what kinds of things to expect.

While not as impressive as the other recently acclaimed cell shaded game Borderlands, this game certainly holds it's own in terms of the visuals and it's not a case of - it looks good for a Wii game. The game just looks good period.

Before I forget this game has nothing to do with the original launch game Red Steel - so don't fret it.

You play the role of the lone Swordsmen (and gunman) ravenging against the hordes of enemies. There is a story wrapped around it but honestly it's inconsequential other then giving you things to do. The game is based on area play. By that I mean you start in an area kill a bunch of things, complete some missions, then move onto the next area. Each of these 'areas' are controlled by a central hub - your base - once you do everything there is to do within one hub you move onto the next hub and a whole new set of areas. It's not linear, but it's not open ended it's kind of in the middle. While I would prefer a more open ended approach this isn't a bad way to handle things. It's similar to Borderlands but more confined, which has the advantage of limiting endless travel time.

So as you complete missions you get paid and you can also smash up nearly everything insight to get more money as well. You can then trade in that coin for some new weapons and more importantly improve your existing weapons and learn special moves as well. It's these special moves that really enhance the game play. They are needed to create various special attacks, defenses, combos, and special kill animations. Once you start acquiring them the variety and general fun of the game increases to the point where you do really feel like you are controlling a highly skilled death dealing machine. One that would be completely at home in an action movie.

Now all of this sounds (and looks) pretty good. But it would be nothing if it didn't play [control] well. Fortunately it does. This game is the first 'game' to use the new Wii-Motion Plus controls and incase you haven't picked one up with new Wii-Sports Resort or Tiger Woods 2010 you can get this game bundled with (or without) it.

- I want to stress you do need the motion plus controller for this game. It's not optional.

The controls are what you would expect from a Wii FPS you use the nun-chuck to move Front/Back/Strafe and the Wii-mote to aim/turn. You also use the Wii-mote to slash with your sword and aim your gun. The Wii Motion-plus maps these movements very well. Aiming feels very accurate and the motion controls to various slashes (all angles and various speeds) works well. You are also to fully tweak the bounding boxes to control movement as well as use presets to setup a control scheme that handles the way you play. I played around a bit with tweaking my own settings but ended up just using the Precise setting and it works pretty well. The only issue is if you are really close and it gets a little stuck between targeting and looking around. It's a tad annoying but has very little impact overall. Also depending on your room setup the further back you sit the less this will happen, same goes if you have a bigger TV.

While the sword movements are pretty much 1-1 the combat isn't entirely. You use different button presses and slash combinations to trigger different attacks, like a jumping slash, 360-spin attacks and various others. These are gradually introduced so you can add them pretty seamlessly into your characters repertoire and you aren't overwhelmed from the start. Blocking is also handled through a button press and holding your sword either horizontally or vertically. At first I was hoping blocking would be based on sword position entirely, but this makes more sense. It'd be nearly impossible to actually play the game that way since real sword fighting blocking is based on physical resistance and you couldn't measure that in the game so it wouldn't feel right anyway. This is a happy medium.

All in all Red Steel 2 is a very solid game and uses the Wii's abilities well and is a must have game for that system. It's beautiful looking, flows well, and controls like it should without feeling like it's all just tacked on. I highly recommend this game to any Wii owner that's looking for something more then yet another Mario/party game. It's been spinning in my console since I started and has put Fallout 3 on the back burner again for awhile.

4 out of 5. A bigger (cuz more is almost always better) game and a little more variety to the game could propel this game into one of those games people buy a system for. Seriously it's damn good.

Comments

  • BobbyDigiBobbyDigi ? R U #Hats ! TX Icrontian
    edited March 2010
    Sweet, good to hear. Goin' on my "Do Want" list.

    Thanks kryyst

    -Bobby
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