May 11, 2006 - Leading up to E3, Red Steel was one of the most anticipated Nintendo Wii titles worldwide. Ubisoft is reinventing the first person shooter genre, combining motion controlled gunplay with hand-to-hand sword fighting. We had the chance to deliver exclusive video content, take early looks at concept work and even go hands-on with pre-E3 builds in Paris, France. While the game continues to show promise even now on the showroom floor, our hopes for the control and intuitive "New FPS" experience has yet to be delivered, as Red Steel comes up lacking at Nintendo's booth.
Before we send fans scrambling to the boards in a fury of hatred or depression, we have to get a few things straight. Red Steel still has the potential to be one of the most desirable launch games on the Wii, and we still expect great things from the team working on it. It just needs some serious control work. The E3 demo includes the intro level, which teaches the basics of swordplay and gunplay, as well as simple navigation, zooming and time-freeze abilities. All in all, the demo takes about eight minutes to navigate through, and we've had a chance to experience it multiple times, with multiple editors on multiple system set-ups. In short, we've played the hell out of this thing.
The Presentation:
For starters, the game doesn't hit the level of detail and style found in the target renders shown a while back, or even the official trailer that we have on our own site. Colors aren't as crisp as they could be, the characters have a bit of a cut-out look to them, and the amount of graphical polish just isn't there. While some areas are destructible, such as the fish tanks, televisions and cars, others simply aren't. It's a bit odd to shoot through a paper door and see sun rays sparkle through, and then turn just moments later and have shotgun blasts do nothing to a set of bottles. If Red Steel is going to turn heads graphically, we haven't seen it happen on Nintendo hardware yet.
The Gameplay: Gun Battle
As Nintendo has said over and over, however, playing is believing. The presentation could take a backseat of the gameplay was on, but unfortunately it didn't give the feeling we were hoping for at all. The gun control is amazingly jittery, having extremely high sensitivity when not zoomed in, and the overall feel is still very clunky. If you look back to the Nintendo conference, you can actually see the high sensitivity in action, as the main Ubisoft representative that was playing even overcompensated a ton, hitting enemies at a very low rate. The idea for Wii FPS games is to eliminate the need for dual analog sticks, but Red Steel isn't solving any problems, as analog control is being mapped directly to the Wii-mote. Since the sensor bar is placed above or below the television, players point at the bar itself, not at the screen. For this reason, the game doesn't allow pinpoint accuracy with the Wii-mote, as players have to steer a cursor rather than aiming at a point on-screen, which is a far more natural approach.
We aren't saying the game needs to work like a light gun, it just needs to have an accurate one-to-one representation of where your hands are in relation to the game. If a character pops out of a hiding place, players need to be able to swing their hand over and point at him as they would the barrel of a gun, and that is definitely not the case right now. The ability to calibrate your own controller and sensitivity will be added in later, so hopefully that will solve a lot of the problems we are seeing. Again, we played this demo over and over with multiple set-ups, and each time we had the same conclusion: Red Steer is harder to control than dual analog or a PC mouse.
The Gameplay: Sword Battle
Since Red Steel focuses on not only gunplay, but also hand-to-hand fighting, we thought it necessary to go a bit in-depth with how this works and feels. First off, the swordplay portions of the game actually feel better than any of the gun areas, which is already a testament to the hybrid design. It's the control that kills it again, however, as the implementation with motion sensing isn't where it should be. Players use the nunchuck controller to block attacks with a small knife, while simultaneously using the Wii-mote for their own sword. While the nunchuck portion works relatively well (after a few times through the demo we could defeat any enemy without getting hit nice) the actual sword play isn't there yet.
Instead of mimicking every movement of your hand (something that is done in Nintendo Baseball), Red Steel instead waits for a full action to be done with the Wii-mote, and then executes it on screen. What this means, however, is that it is simply simulating a button press. If multiple people play the sword portion, you should see multiple swipes and styles coming form the character on-screen. After all, everyone swings differently. Instead, there are only a few different swipes that will be recognized. If you swipe the Wii-mote horizontally, it will show a horizontal swipe. Attempt an upper-cut motion, however, and the action is shown as a generic up-to-down slice instead, as if you went from above your head and down. The difference here is a bit hard to explain, but it will make or break the experience. Right now motions convert to a pre-determined swipe, instead of the player actually using the Wii-mote to realistically attack with a virtual sword. The difference is huge, and it has to be tweaked.
Where to go From Here:
We all love the Red Steel concept. We've been watching it in motion for a while, we showed it in motion exclusively to the world a few days ago, and we've been playing it non-stop. Red Steel is one of the most anticipated games on the system, and we want to see it tighten up and seriously deliver. As it stands right now, we can't recommend the game to anyone due to the shaky controls and lack of polish. We fully understand, however that this is E3. This is the chance for Ubisoft to show off Red Steel, gain some impressions and do what it needs to do in order to pull off a top-tier game. Swordplay simulates swipes rather than giving the player full control of the weaponry, and the sensitivity and execution of gunplay is still off. These are both changes that can be made, however, and we'll be keeping our eye out for them in future builds. Graphically the game could be improved on as well, not just by allowing for sharper colors or more beautiful backdrops, but also by adding destructible environments and more glorious effects. There is plenty of time to make Red Steel the game everyone wants it to be, and we expect to see it from a company like Ubisoft. It has some issues, but there's still potential. Right now it's all up to the developers.
