Sadly Red Steel fails to impress

This was supposed to be THE game to get to go along with Zelda this year. We all were sucked into the hype and made to believe that this game would be really great, and not only that but be a true showpiece for the Wii's graphics capabilities. It turns out that this game got the gameplay all wrong and the graphics only half right-sometimes.

I bought Red Steel on launch day with Zelda, I have played a great deal of it to this point. When I first read the reviews for this game before it came out (Gamespot) I figured that they were just being biased again (Zelda review anyone?). Sadly, it turns out they were right. This game is just broken and it is definitely the developer Ubisoft's fault all the way.

Problems with Red Steel:

-Control is not good, in fact it makes you want to play with dual analogue again. For the Wii, control is the most important aspect, and this game is a failure at making the Wii-mote something better for FPS games.

-The Sensor bar looses the Wii-mote at critical times during gameplay. It seems to have a very weak and shaky connection with the Sensor bar, and its the only game that has done this to me so far(I've played 6 Wii games). Unforgivable.

-Yes we all know that the game just turns too slow, and I knew this going in but it does make you seem even more crippled when you add in the Sensor bar issues and sensitivity issues.

-The graphics are really horrible looking a lot of the time. The Wii is not about graphics right? I totally agree with that, but I've posted screenshots of Red Steel on my site that were made to look better than what the actual game looked. I was definitely expecting more. The jaggies are so so bad that it pains me to watch this game in action sometimes. The Wii can do so much better. I'm talking BAD jaggies guys; in a later level in the game there are a lot of lights on the wall and if you look at the lights just a little bit ahead of you they break up into a couple white jagged little lines. When you get close to them they finally become a solid rectangular light. You have to see it to understand for yourself. The textures on most walls are good, but there are way too many walls that have no texture on them at all and makes this game look very bland at times. The character models kinda look good, but I would have to say that Resident Evil 4 had better looking ones with more detail. Sad. Also if you play this game on a non-widescreen TV you will have black bars that are permanently on the screen and you can't adjust anything with the aspect ratio in the option menu. The list goes on. All of these things add up and make this game just look very weak even compared to other Wii launch games.

Guys, I was looking so forward to this game. Anyone who followed this site knows how excited I was for Red Steel. It is so disappointing to see that this game fails on so many levels when I was so hoping for this to be a really great game. Ubisoft will most likely make a sequel because it looks like this game is selling really well because of all the pre-hype. I hope they fix everything that was wrong with this game and make the sequel much improved on all levels.

You want to see the potential of the Wii-mote in a FPS game? Call of Duty 3 gets the job done so much better than Red Steel for the controls. However, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz has a FPS mini game called "Monkey Wars" that INSTANTLY feels great and easy to play. Its very sad that a MINI game in Monkey Ball can make a game like Red Steel (2 year dev time) look so bad in comparison. First Person Shooters can be done well on the Wii, just try Call of Duty 3 or Monkey Wars and you will see the true potential that we have been waiting for. There is no doubt in my mind that future FPS games will be totally awesome on the Wii. Red Steel is going to be a painful growing pain for developers to learn from.