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The solid story and great visuals offer a fun ride, but frustrating problems (mostly technical) drag that fun factor way down.
If you can accept the fact that the Wii cannot approach Xbox 360 level graphics, you can agree that the graphics in Red Steel are pretty awesome in their own right. Lighting lends both to the aesthetic quality as well as to the design and game play quality. Atmospheric and particle effects are employed to enhance mood. The graphics and style also produce unique environments that avoid any appearance or feeling of repitition through the entire game.
The environment has dynamic qualities and the physics system is fairly robust. Bullets break boxes, blow up cars, explode milk crates, and splinter wooden walls, among other effects. Stacked boxes can be pushed over or scattered about. Desk fans spin, stock tickers scroll, and brooks babble.
The story is also cool, though not terribly deep. You play as Scott, an American thrust into the middle of a Yakuza feud. Like Gordon Freeman, you never speak a single line, but your character and others are developed through NPC dialog and interactions.
Sadly, this bubbly praise must be stifled by searing anger at some significant technical problems. First and foremost among these, the sword fighting. It sucks. Period. Second, too many times the slo-mo targeting ability refuses to let me hit the clearly visible box representing an enemy's weapon. Since most of the game involves these two mechanics, it is fair to say that the game play is dimished throughout the experience. Third, why must checkpoints always occur before every unskippable two minute in-game cut scene which adds no meaningful information that would apply to the immediate situation?
Overall, Red Steel offers some great things and some terrible things. It is a shame that the terrible things must outweigh the great things in the final analysis.
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