Oh Red Steel why?

The shooting and slashing first-person Wii title from Ubisoft had such great potential, but it just didn't come together.

I played the game a bit at E3 and during that Nintendo event in New York City earlier this year and both times I was concerned about what I saw. It seemed like a really cool idea that just didn't fully deliver. The controls felt wonky and I was concerned that the game wouldn't come together.

Boy was I right.

Not only are the controls still a little bit loose, but the game is plagued with a plethora of other issues.

For starters the artificial intelligence is just horrid, like 80s horrid. The way the bad guys popped up from obvious hiding places or charged down long hallways at you made the game feel like one of those old light gun titles, essentially a cleverly disguised shooting gallery.

And the dialog, who the hell wrote the dialog. I'm taking on this gang, this evil Yakuza gang and when I shoot at them, I kid you not, they call me a murderer. Seriously, what's up with that. And they use the word over and over again, mostly because there only seems to be a few phrases built into the game for use during the many shoot-outs.

The graphics are, at times, quite sub-par, with white lines popping up around characters, jaggies, and glitches. You can't shoot people who have given up or are bystanders. Actually you can shoot them, but it does no damage and they say things like "Hey, watch it."

Oh, and the voice acting is crap, absolute crap.

The thing I found most troubling about the game was the way the character's hand seem to sort of bend the wrong direction while holding the gun. I think this was because the sensor showed I was pointing slightly to the right, more than I was, and it translated that into this weird, physically impossible wrist turn.

So what you have with Red Steel is very cool concept that mechanically comes in at just above playable but is wrapped up in poor graphics, bad audio, bad plot, bad script and bad voice acting. Oh and did I mention that the game uses still images as cut-scenes? Sure it's been done before, and quite well, but in this case it just makes the game look unfinished. Brian Crecente

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