For the first time in three years, somebody’s managed to create an action game that actually justifies the Wiis stick waggling controls.
The first Red Steel was a horrible jumbled mess that played like the stick waggling motions were individual buttons that didn’t know if you’d meant to press them or not. Well, this time Ubisoft decided they were going to do it right! The controls are much tighter and more intuitive thanks to the new ‘Wii Motion Plus’ accessory that allows the Wii controller do what it was supposed to do from the beginning. You now can switch between your sword and your gun on the fly, mixing stabby, slashy mayhem for just pulling out a shotgun and blowing someone away Indiana Jones style. The gameplay and combat is the best part of the game… pity that’s almost all there is.
Imagine you’re watching a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western and you’re reaching the end of the movie. Towns have been rode into, bandits have been shot and the girl has been saved. Now just as the sheriff is thanking the grizzled gunslinger he pulls out a sword and starts breaking everything in sight. He shoots every bottle on every shelf, he hacks chairs to pieces, and that safe in the back room? You may not want to go in there for a few minutes. Before the sheriff has even finished talking to the crazed gunman he leaves without saying a word.
That’s what it’s like to live in Caldera, the world of Red Steel 2 (and also the Latin word for ‘Cauldron’.) a mix of the Wild West, Feudal Japan and Mad Max, where you play as a gunslinging, sword-swinging cowboy who has the mysterious power of manifesting wealth from the destruction of scenery. Crates, bins, chairs, bottles, post boxes, vending machines… they all explode in a torrent of coins if shot or slashed with your sword. I’m seriously wondering if the only reason there are only three people in this town is because everyone else is staying away from the crazy guy with a trench-coat and a gun. If you ask me it was their own fault for constructing everything out of coins in the first place. In fact, I’d swear that our protagonist is a worse threat to the town than the enemies you fight. Maybe they aren’t actually bandits, maybe they’re the mayor and town council trying to stop you from destroying everything?
The story may be ridiculous, but it’s still fun to play and has a stylish setting with a cartoony Cel-Shaded look that sets it apart from all the other games out there, apart from Borderlands, or Okami… or XIII back on the Gamecube… but even so, it’s an added bonus as it lets the game look rather nice even with the Wii’s 
underpowered hardware. Ubisoft seem to have wrung out every last bit of juice they could from that little white box, but at what cost? The town of Caldera doesn’t have anyone in it apart from you, three NPC’s and the bandits that you kill. Maybe they all left because the town is divided up by mechanical doors that take about ten seconds to open in order to hide all the loading screens? I think it’s because the cartoony graphics make me think I’m going to find the whole place is a big cardboard cut-out designed to fool me.
This game is an achievement in itself, but I feel there was so much potential for it to be so much more. If they had made this game a free-roaming adventure around this fantastic setting and let me just walk into the town of Caldera and run around drinking in the atmosphere with a gun and a sword at my own discretion I would have been apoplectic with glee. I should have felt like Roland Deschain rolling in to town unannounced and just sorting people’s problems out… you know like in a western? At the very least give us a multiplayer. Even the first Red Steel had multiplayer, it was crap but it was still there.
As it is, I can’t think that this game is anything other than too little too late. If you have a Wii and nothing to play on it, give this a go. If you don’t, then just wait for the inevitable sequel/rip-off they’re going to make with the Playstation Move. This is too fun a concept for them not to and with some better technology behind it maybe they can put it to good use.
