Red Steel 2 Impressions: Better, but Not Great
June 11, 2009 by srfto
When Red Steel was first premiered, it got a lot of people excited about the potential for Wii’s motion control for more hardcore games. Unfortunately, the kinks were far from worked out and the game’s shoddy presentation made it an overall disappointed, turning that excitement into worry that the whole idea didn’t have legs. Given all that, it seems the hype machine is back in full swing for Red Steel 2, which takes advantage of the Wii’s new MotionPlus technology. Ubisoft is hoping that the new tech will make the game more responsive and fluid than the original. Of course, that wouldn’t solve all the problems of Red Steel, so what are they doing to shore up the first game’s weaknesses?
For one they’ve made some improvements in the game’s setting design. The first game was loaded with drab locations, but the new game has moved away from that as part of its general new art direction, which is more stylized with cel-shaded graphics and less realistic. The same basic idea has also made its way into the combat system and controls, as the main character can now pull off more athletic moves and smash a lot of different objects in the world environment. The gameplay seems to be roughly the same as the original, combining a basic point-and-shoot mechanic with some sword fighting. The sword combat has been beefed up a little – MotionPlus allows the game to sense the strength of a swing, so you can just waggle around the WiiMote randomly to beat down (or slash up) the bad guys. It’s still not all great though, because the direction of your swing doesn’t actually matter – just the force. It seems like sword combat could get kind of repetitive.
This is all based off information from the E3 demo of the game, so it may be too early to count Red Steel 2 out just yet. The game does promise some more in depth combat later on, so we’ll see how that pans out when the game releases late next year.
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