Red Steel

Sweet sassy molassy, this game sucks so hard. There was a point in time when it didn’t bother me, and the point has long since passed. This game makes me want to punch small animals and babies it’s so horrid. There hasn’t been a game that I’ve owned in a long time that has made me feel so absolutely angry that I wasted 50 clams to pick it up. There could have been so many other things that I could have spent that money on, but instead I wasted it on this worthless pile. So what has Ubisoft done to screw up this game?

The short answer to this question is: everything. There’s hardly anything that this game does right, and it unfortunately sold many copies simply because it came out when at the Wii launch. Poor individuals such as myself wanted to see this “revolution” in FPS console controls and bought it to try it out saying, “It can’t be that bad, can it?” Yes, it’s that bad. It’s not fun, and frustration occurs more often than naught because of shoddy controls and a piss poor Wii remote connection.

Let’s go ahead and talk about the controls. This is really the worst part of the game, and if they had perfected everything it would have been ok. Instead, as it is, you fight the game left and right to get anything accomplished, and it makes you strangle babies because you get so mad. The problems you face with the controls is that they are incredibly sloppy and loose, not unlike Jenna Jameson. What the game does wrong is in how the game handles turning. Think of a PC FPS for a moment, when you move the mouse, the entire screen shifts and follows the reticule. Red Steel, however, allows you to move the reticule around the screen within the confines of an “invisible box.” If you hit the edges of that box, your character starts to move in whatever direction. It feels almost like a light-gun (House of the Dead-esque) experience until you hit this box and start turning. And honestly, that’s really not that bad. It as a concept works, but controlling a game that way isn’t very fun, at least in the presentation that Red Steel provides. But when enemies are running and gunning you down, having to point towards the edge of the screen to initiate movement isn’t the best. It’s slow and not that great. That’s more an opinion than anything else, but there are legitimate problems with how the game recognizes the remote that make the game a steamy pile.

I haven’t had any problems with any of my other Wii games in terms of simply understanding the remote. Zelda rocks, CoD: 3 feels good, Trauma Center has pinpoint accuracy, but the coding for Red Steel is sloppy as hell. What happens is that the reticule will occasionally jump for no reason, making me think the coders for the game didn’t fully understand how the Wii works. If everyone else got it right, how did they make such a mistake? You generally have to fight this twitch throughout the entire game, making sluggish controls even worse in the middle of a firefight.

Outside of the controls, the presentation of the game is just marginally better. On the graphical side, the game isn’t awful but it’s not great either. The characters could use to have a ton more detail, especially in the wake of Resident Evil 4. I’m not saying they should be fantastically detailed beyond belief, but the system can definitely do better. The cutscenes are horrid. Essentially they’re just colored in storyboards with people talking over them. The designers didn’t even take into account that some – hundreds of thousands of – people have widescreen televisions (such as yours truly), and if subtitles take up more than one line, the second line gets cut off. Good job guys.

So without putting too many more words into this post about this not fun game, I will just say to stay as far away from this pile as you can. If you happen to have picked it up during the launch of the Wii, well then may God have mercy on your soul.