Review:
Red Steel 2

The original Red Steel was a launch game for the Wii and it had a huge amount of hype behind it because at the time, nobody knew how exactly the Wii Remote would work with sword and gun-based combat. When the game was released, however, it became very apparent that swordplay on the Wii simply wouldn’t work without 1:1 movement. While the gunplay and the multiplayer were enjoyable, the rest of the game was sorely lacking and so Red Steel was quickly pushed aside in favour of other first person games that did the job better, like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and, more recently, Modern Warfare: Reflex.

Now, three years later, here we are again, except this time Ubisoft have been working with the Wii Motion Plus, the add-on that allows for true 1:1 game control. This time the pressure is really on – can swordplay work in an FPS game?

In a word, yes. Quite frankly, this is some of the best combat to ever be featured in any game ever made. No words can describe just how truly satisfying it is to be surrounded by eight enemies and to be able to dispose of all of them in completely different ways, all with simple flicks of the wrist.

Everything is hinged perfectly on the Remote. Slice up, down, left or right and the katana moves exactly so. Slice wider, you hit harder. Jab forward, you stab. Hold Z and you’ll lock on to an enemy and all the excessively powerful combos rely on careful timing of the A and B buttons. At the beginning, it might seem like a lot to grasp, but the game slowly incorporates all these new moves in after every mission. By the time you reach the third chapter, you’ll be an unstoppable one man army and, more importantly, you’ll actually feel like one. You can also adjust the sensitivity settings, ranging from working out while you battle to a more relaxed wrist flicking affair.

You’ll also find yourself spending huge amounts of cash upgrading all your abilities and weapons as you play. You can earn the right to use more devastating finishing strikes, upgrade your incredibly powerful special attacks, increase the damage your katana deals out, pump up the volume on your guns and increase your own health. To be fair, there are a massive amount of extras to spend money on, making it worth trashing the background objects for extra hidden cash, although it’s not worth upgrading any guns other than the pistol.