Red Steel - Nintendo Wii review

4 January 2007 11:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

So you got your Wii for Christmas but want to play something more than just Zelda or another round of ten pin bowling. Ubisoft believes it has the answer with Red Steel a gun tooting, sword swinging martial arts game.

According to the storyline, armed thugs have kidnapped your fiancée and murdered her father, a feared yakuza overlord. You, her former bodyguard, follow her to Tokyo, where you're plunged into the midst of a brutal gang war.

As a first person shooter this would be usual and possibly boring fare. Bad guys appear, you shoot them or hack them down with your cache of weapons or sword and job done move on to the next room to do the same again to a new batch of baddies.

The storyline isn't exactly riveting and the graphics are, probably due to the limitations of the console down right poor in parts. In fact if this review was for a PS2 game then it wouldn't have even scored 5/10.

Where Red Steel differs however is by taking full advantage of Nintendo's motion sensored controllers and showing that you can play First Person Shooters on the new console.

To play you'll need both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk and like Zelda, the Wii remote is used for aiming and shooting, while the Nunchuk for moving around or interacting with things such as opening doors or picking up discarded weapons or reloading.

The first thing that will strike you playing Red Steel is that it's actually very hard to control at first.

It took us some time to get used to actually having to point to the right part of the screen to shoot down the bad guys. Think House of the Dead with the gun but then add that you've got to move around as well with your other hand and you start to get the picture.

Point the Wii remote at the screen and you'll be able to pick off the bad guys, innovatively jabbing the remote towards the screen zooms in while pulling back zooms out, making sure you get that full body work out.

As the game progresses - don't worry there are plenty of checkpoints as for most of the time your aim will be so shocking that you'll get shot easily after it's taken you ages to shoot your opponents - you eventually advance on to being able to use your sword. It's here that the game becomes a bit more involved that just shooting at stuff although in our gaming this has been few and far between.

For those uninitiated in the realms of sword fighting this involves you swinging your arms around violently and anyone worried about their Wii remote flying towards their television should make sure that they've got the strap securely fastened around their wrist.

AI on the whole can be described as average, while at times they are clever little buggers, for most of the time you can run past them find a corner to hide and then take them out when they come running after you. Due to a regenerating health option, as long as you are patient enough and don't go for the "stand in the middle of the room trying to shoot everything without cover" you should be fine.

As we’ve mentioned before graphics are so so, but nothing on the next generation consoles and you'll be better off thinking PS2 rather than anything else while sound involved the usual gun noises, heavy Japanese accents and shattering glass. Call of Duty with its immersive cinema almost movie like production this is not.

Verdict

If Red Steel was on any other console this would be getting a heavy bruising from us and a below par review mark. However due to its use of innovate controls on the Nintendo Wii, there is some saving grace.

Red Steel offers the ideal that done properly the Wii will be able to give us some great First Person Shooters, however Red Steel isn't going to be one of them.

One to rent.

Score

Review Recap

Made by: Ubisoft
Price as reviewed: £35
The good: Controls, gameplay
The bad: Graphics, AI
Quick verdict: If Red Steel was on any other console this would be getting a heavy bruising from us and a below par review mark, as it is the innovating controls do offer some saving grace
Score