At 2009′s Electronic Entertainment Expo conference, Ubisoft finally, after years of suspense and anticipation, unveiled Red Steel 2, and it may be a little different from what you expected. In fact, to an extent, Red Steel 2 has just about been a complete overhaul of the system. However, rest assured that that is a perfectly good thing.
Probably one of the most notable first changes is that of style and setting. While Red Steel took place in present day and featured a realistic graphics style, Red Steel 2 takes a more comic book style approach. Located in the middle of a scorching no-man’s-land desert, the storyline stars a cowboy gunslinger/samurai in a stylish trench coat. It all has something of a Mad Max: Road Warrior vibe. At the beginning of the demo Ubisoft showed at E3, the main character awakens in the desert on the ground with his hands tied on a rope attached to a motorcycle. As a man who apparently doesn’t like the main character hops onto the bike, the engine revs. They take off, into a secluded city, where the rider begins driving around and crashing main character against objects. Eventually our hero manages to free one of his hands and shoot the rider in the back. He gets to his feet. This is clearly a very different type of game from the first.
Like before, the game play in Red Steel 2 is in first-person. The Wii remote controls the aiming reticule, slashing motions with the wrist cause identical movements with the in-game katana, B pulls out the revolver and fires, and A is used for dashing. Red Steel 2 will ship with Nintendo’s MotionPlus peripheral, which is a bigger deal than you think. Using this technology, Ubisoft has designed the game so that every movement with your wrist is matched identically onscreen, with pinpoint three-dimensional accuracy.
The result of Ubisoft’s hard work is a game more focused on sword combat and less on gun play. It is in many ways reminiscent of Devil May Cry, only in first-person. As you progress through the game you can level and gain new abilities, such as tossing people into the air and slicing them up on the way down, or knocking an enemy forward, slowing time, and shooting him several times over with your revolver as he flies through the air across the room. You can also unlock new guns. Again, it appears to have a lot more in common with a brawler than a shooter. Still, I doubt that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
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