It's no surprise that I'm looking forward to the Wii U launch. I bought a Wii at launch and enjoyed playing Wii Sport and Twilight Princess. However, once I finished Zelda I was left thinking okay now what. While I ended up getting Monkey Ball and WarioWare one game that I intentionally avoided was Red Steel.
I had read the reviews for Red Steel and they were not flattering. However, earlier this year I finally picked up a copy for £1 and this month finally got around to playing it. All I can say is that the reviews were right, this game is severely flawed. It just shows so many signs of being rushed for launch, cut scenes are sometimes still frames, some times animated and sometimes the voice acting just stops half-way through them.
You can see what the developers were trying to do but the game just never lives up to it's promise. The controls are the opposite of the successful shooters that followed later on the Wii, the button which I expect to jump snaps to sights, the expected snap to sights button is crouch and what I expect to crouch jumps. At one point in the second mission I tried to duck and ended up inside a piece of furniture and had to reset the game to continue.
Perhaps these control issues could be forgiven if the sword fighting worked. Unfortunately these controls are even worse. There is significant lag between inputting a swing and the character performing it, also on default sensitivity the swings only register half the time.
But why bring this up now? The reason is that Red Steel is made by Ubisoft, the same company that is producing the Wii U launch title Zombi U. When I was young I played the original Zombi on my Amiga and I would very much like for this reboot to provide me with as many hours of fun as the original. I just hope that Ubisoft have learnt from their experience with Red Steel. After all the fantastic Red Steel 2 proved that given enough time they can indeed fulfil their promises and deliver a great experience.
