Often when I go to a publisher’s game demos, in which they invite the press to a hotel to preview upcoming games, I leave feeling annoyed that the games I’m the most impressed with are not for the Wii. But even though I was impressed by the Xbox 360/PS3/PC games Assassin’s Creed 2 (which appears to be less repetitive than the first one) and Splinter Cell Conviction (which looks promising, even though it appears they’ve stripped out most of the stealth elements, and which has this really awesome trick where they project information onto the environment), I was just as impressed by Red Steel 2.
A sequel to an underwhelming 2006 game, Red Steel 2 seems to have tossed out pretty much everything and started over (making one wonder why they didn’t just come up with a new title as well). The main similarity between the two games is that the hero can use both a gun and a sword. But while the original was essentially a shooter with occasional sequences where you would suddenly lose access to your gun and have to duel some dude, in this sequel you can switch from gun to sword at any time. Actually, you don’t really switch, since you have access to both weapons at once; pushing the B button fires the gun while swinging your Wii remote will bring the sword into play. Think of it as a first person take on Devil May Cry's gameplay.
I have always wondered at the whole sword/gun thing. I mean, if you have a gun, why would you use a sword instead? I asked this of Ubisoft, and the answer was, because the sword is fun, which is a terrible answer but is at least true; the sword is fun. You can do some interesting things with it, such as swinging upward to hurl an enemy into the air, jumping up after him and slashing him on the way down.
Red Steel 2 uses the MotionPlus add-on to allow a lot of control over sword movements. You can angle the sword and block, and how hard you swing determines how hard your enemy is hit (the game wants you to really swing that thing). The controls seemed very responsive, although I did not get the hang of blocking at all in the little time I had to play.
Visually impressive (particularly in an opening sequence in which the player is dragged through the desert), the game has a clean, crisp look and an interesting western motif (again, this appears to be totally unrelated to the original game). There was no story preview; hopefully the storytelling has improved as much as the gameplay appears to have.
Red Steel 2 is the most promising game I’ve seen for the Wii this year, so it’s unfortunate that Ubisoft has decided to push back its release date: originally slated for a holiday release, the game is now expected to come out early in 2010.
