Ubisoft slices my low expectations to shreds.

Ubisoft has been an enigma to me for several years now. During last generation, they were one of my favorite publishers, making plenty of amazing titles in a bunch of different genres. As far as Western developers go, Ubisoft felt like the friendly alternative to faceless corporate monoliths of EA and Activision. It’s too bad that, despite all this cache going into the current gen, Ubisoft has dropped significantly in my eyes after several missteps this gen. The first Red Steel was one of these. Luckily, despite my reservations, Red Steel 2 is the furthest thing from a misstep. Instead, it’s actually one of the best games I’ve played that has utilized motion controls so heavily.

Merging the samurai and western genres has been all the rage recently. Movies like Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django and the upcoming Korean film, The Good, the Bad, The Weird have done this to great effect. There was even a PlayStation 2 game explicitly titled “Samurai Western.” As such, inserting this genre mixture into Red Steel 2 didn’t really feel original. It’s a good thing for all of us that games don’t have to be wholly original in concept to still be fun. Just as Red Steel 2 mixes two genres in terms of art style and setting, the gameplay also comes across as a similar mixture of genres. While the first title played pretty much like a straightforward shooter with some sword-based interludes scattered throughout, the new title only looks like an FPS. The heavy focus on sword fighting through the adventure makes it feel more like Devil May Cry than like Half-Life. Unlike the first game, where the sword segments seemed like an afterthought, Red Steel 2 has been designed with sword fighting as the core focus of the experience.

Red Steel 2 is essentially a proving ground for Nintendo’s somewhat new Wii MotionPlus accessory. This accessory adds greater precision to the motion detection already in the Wiimote, and is put to great use in Red Steel 2. While the motion tracking in the game is never entirely 1:1, it is always close enough to feel right while playing. The game only loses track of the Wiimote if you flail it about wildly and avoid pointing it at the screen for incredibly long stretches of time. For the majority of my time with Red Steel 2, I found the motion detection to be flawless, allowing me to swing my sword in any direction and have those motions replicated perfectly on screen. While there are scripted animations that your character will follow, these all blend well with the movements I was making in real life, and honestly helped make the experience jive better than if the game was mimicking my movements completely accurately.

The scripted animations that I just mentioned actually play a huge role in making combat in the title so thrilling. As I made my way through the quest, I found myself unlocking more and more advanced maneuvers. These techniques are pulled off with relative ease (usually they involve combining two or more basic moves), but really help add to the depth of combat. There are a plethora of different moves you can pull off in any encounter, but you’ll have to choose them wisely if you hope to get past the more difficult enemies. Not only are the moves you learn useful, but they are incredibly varied and actually pretty cool looking. Dashing up to an enemy only to shove the barrel of your gun underneath his chin right before you blow him away was actually a singularly thrilling experience. While the balance in the difficulty of enemy encounters wasn’t always there (most of the later encounters were a cakewalk due to my character being incredibly overpowered), the feeling of slashing through the weaker enemies was still spot on and incredibly satisfying.

Along with this problem of balancing the title, I also found the game’s pacing to be a little off. The mission structure that supposedly tied the experience together didn’t really flow properly. I found that I either had too few quests at once (making for a pretty linear experience) or far too many active quests for me to even keep them straight. Since there is no overworld map or straightforward system for selecting quests and viewing objectives, the game would sometimes get a little frustrating if I wanted to tackle the side quests with any sort of organization. The pacing problems present in the title also relate to the fact that there is not a whole lot of variety in the game. I found myself meandering from one enemy encounter to the next, with very little to do in between.

Sure, I could have busted up the limitless supply of crates and barrels in a vain attempt to collect money, but what would have been the point? There is actually a pretty awesome upgrade system in place as a use for all the money that I was constantly stumbling across. This system seemed to work well through the initial 80% of the title. However, at some point it starts to fall apart, as the game’s pacing problems emerged again and I found myself with a surplus of several hundred thousand bucks after purchasing everything well before the end of the game. Stuff like this bothers me maybe more than most, but I don’t really want to be able to nab everything in a game on my first time through without at least putting in a fair amount of effort. In Red Steel 2, it was pretty easy to see absolutely everything that the game had to offer without really having to push myself.

The world of Red Steel 2 was pretty divisive, at least as far as how it affected me. On the one hand, I found the environments to be gorgeously evocative. I could almost feel the dust caking my throat as I wandered through the sparse, lonely environments. This was where the divisiveness came into play. At first, it didn’t really bother me that the environments were as empty as they actually were. However, after about hour five, the whole thing started to wear on me. Why weren’t there any people in any of the locations I visited besides the enemies? Were these the dwelling places of a long-dead civilization like in Metroid Prime? The Metroid comparison actually feels pretty apt, as the sense of isolation that series is known for was present in Red Steel 2 in great abundance. Unfortunately, I didn’t really find it to be the immersive style of loneliness that I love so much in Metroid titles. Instead, it was a harsher, less natural feeling sparseness that pointed more to a lack of additional development than it did to a conscious design choice.

Beyond the emptiness of the game’s many different environments, I absolutely adored the look of Red Steel 2. It is without a doubt one of the prettiest games on the Wii and not just because of how may polys the engine is pushing. The art design works amazingly well and some of the vistas in the game are as beautiful as anything else I have seen in recent games. The mild cel-shading in the title (reminiscent of another Ubisoft title from last gen, XIII) works so well for the mood of the game that I hardly even noticed the flat textures and lighting. Just how well this worked was made even more apparent when I found myself watching the jarring cut scenes done out of engine. The additional detail on the models and the more complex lighting actually worked to the detriment of these scenes. I found the in-game stuff to be a lot more impressive, actually.

In case you can’t tell by this point, I really enjoyed my experience with Red Steel 2.  It really is a perfect showpiece for what I think makes motion controls so interesting in the first place. In spite of the fewer buttons I had to press and combos I had to memorize, the game still managed to offer me plenty of depth, largely due to the implementation of the controls. In the 16 hours or so I spent with the game, I only had very few isolated instances where the game didn’t perform the action that I associated with a given movement. For the rest of the experience, everything flowed together flawlessly, and it was completely possible to effortlessly pull off a wide variety of combat techniques on the fly. Red Steel 2 is not only a ridiculous improvement over the first game, it is a rock-solid title in its own right. Ubisoft really nailed it with this one. I just hope that the inevitable third entry in the series manages to fix some of my minor gripes with this one.