Red Steel is the buggiest launch title, but it's still fun.

Red Steel and Call of Duty 3 are the only shooters out on the Wii for launch, and both of them are pretty fun, but both of them have their flaws.

Red Steel is your basic action/ninja movie that hits straight to dvd. You and your girlfriend are going out to eat at a restaurant and you are meeting her dad for the first time and you are telling him that you are going to marry his daughter. When you get up to go to the car to meet him, suddenly a bunch of people raid the restaurant you're in and start shooting everybody. They kidnap your girlfriend. You must go down to Tokyo and fight through the Yakuza gang to save the her.

I'm gonna get straight down to the point. I know what you're all wondering, how's are the controls? I'll tell you right away. The controls could be great, but with some bugs, they can get really annoying. They just have a few problems, and future shooters can learn from this mistake, and I'm sure they will do a lot better than this. So what did they do wrong in this game? Small crosshairs, extremely fast scrolling speed, this combination can ruin a video game. You can adjust your scrolling speed, but you need it to be fast so you can have better visibility to the enemies around you. Seriously, the crosshair in the game, besides Brother's in Arms, (which there are none) are the smallest I've ever seen in a game, which is quite odd, considering this is is one of the first launch first person shooters. A lot of shooters have different size crosshairs with different guns, but this one doesn't. All guns have the same crosshairs. They had a little bit of rushing to do on this game so the shotgun can actually shoot long distance enemies, which really isn't very fair, because it will be the main gun that you will want to get, which is a very unfair choice, but it's really the only guy that is very easy to use. The game does have a lock on feature that really helps with the aiming because it keeps your crosshairs in a certain vicinity of the player you're aiming at, but still, the the crosshairs are really tiny, but this does help a lot with the aiming and you are probably going to be using this a lot.

So how do you control it, the game? Well it's actually pretty simple. "A" locks on to enemies. You aim at the screen with the remote to aim your crosshair, like in a game like Time Crisis or the old Area 51 games. You move your guy around with the nunchuck's analog stick and you shoot with the trigger of the remote. There are some basic other controls but those are the basics, and it really takes no time at all to get used to the controls and feels natural almost right away. A big bug in the game that I found to be very annoying is that if you aim towards the very right or left of the screen and then move it up or down, sometimes the screen starts jerking around. Sometimes you will be trying to aim at someone at the corner of the screen and when you try to get there your screen will just bug out and your guy will be all jerky. Also if you aim the controller off the screen, the game pretty much gets stuck on what's going on so when you put it back in the screen it doesn't move back in there until you aim to the very bottom of the screen and then put your crosshairs back in the middle. All these (big) bugs really hinder with the gameplay and make it a lot more challenging to play and it really feels like this game needed some more time in the lab.

Another very odd glitch that I encountered was at a cherain checkpoint my guy would just randomly move the whole time and even if you pressed forward, it felt as if he was encountering some kind of extreme friction. This is very similar to the N64 glitch where everything would move forward, but I doubt it is the system, and I'm pretty sure it's the game.

If you have seen any previews on this game, it's got that one gimmick... yep, the sword fighting sequences. Awww yeah how fun is it to go through levels with a sword in your hand slicing it around as it follows your every move. Well, truth is, the sword fighting isn't as responsive as your mind may make you think it is. 180 degrees of the remote works perfectly, the other 180 does not. If you swing your Wiimote to the left, your guy will attack as a swinging motion to the left, yet at the same time if you swing the Wiimote to the right, your guy will do a “chopping wood” sword motion where he takes the sword and thrusts it over his head onto the other guys head. 1/10 times your guy will actually swing right. As for other sword motions, besides the left to right attacks, they are pretty responsive and actually feel like an extent0ion of your hand. After a battle or two with the sword you will get another sword that is broken to use as a blocking sword. You can block attacks with this, or parry their attacks and get them right after, almost like a reversal. The sword battles are pretty epic and can take a long time to finish because you will be blocking each others attacks left and right. It's really fun, but the swordfights aren't nearly as common as gunfights.

Another cool thing that they have in this one is that you can actually throw grenades by doing a throwing motion with your nunchuk. Unfortunately, this doesn't work that well and whenever I try to do it, my camera gets stuck and I have search all over the screen with my Wii remote to get the crosshairs to move. You also get a sniper in the game and to snipe people you move the Wiimote closer to the screen to zoom in more. This would have been a cool feature but half of the time it doesn't even zoom in. There is also a focus mode which is what some games call "bullet time." It's a mode somewhat inspired by The Matrix where time slows down and you can have an easier time getting shots out on your enemies. To get your focus meter up you have to shoot enemies consecutively. Once you get it, activate focus mode and then place your crosshairs on a few different areas and press A. When the focus mode ends, the highlighted area that you chose will shoot in burst fire at those areas.

Along with a roughly 9-10 hour campaign, the game includes multiplayer; there is a cooperative single player mode and the vs. mode. The vs. mode is a lot of fun! Imagine going one on one with a friend by pointing at the screen and even having a virtual sword fight with them!

So in the long run, the game just feels like a total run n gun shooter where you just get to the end of the level as fast as you can while killing all the enemies in your way. You can usually rush right through levels because it takes a lot to kill you, and your life recharges when you stay out of action and don't get shot. If this would have come out for the Xbox 360, or the PS3, the game would have been absolutely unacceptable because it would feel so repetitive and generic. But since it came out on the Wii, it's a whole new feeling to gamers, making it a cool new experience, but all the bugs the game has with aiming makes this still not be much more than a rental.

The graphics in the game, aren't horrendous, but they certainly aren't exciting. The characters you are fighting against don't really change their facial expressions and they don't look very smooth. They almost look like a character that would be on a Playstation 2 game. As for the environments, there are lots of neat explosions, and a whole lot of textures, but the levels atmosphere's are generally all the same, just exploring threw various indoor corridors. It's a decent looking game in the long run, but since this is the new system, I feel like they should have upped the graphics.

The sound in the game is decent. There is some music in the game, but this music really only comes in when you are in battle sequences, it is fast speed instrumental music that perfectly fits the mood. The gunshots sound okay, you can definitely hear them whizzing by your head, but they seem too quiet to be gunshots. You'll hear different explosions through the game but they seem a lot quieter than other things. Last time I heard an explosion, it was louder than the guy causing the explosion. The voiceovers in the game are downright awful and you will hear them repeated over and over again. A guy in the game says, “I'm going to kill you,” over and over in the game, and after the first time hearing it and laughing, you'll definitely laugh the second time harder when it was surprising that they would even use it the first time. Pretty much every exclamation the enemies uses sounds really cheesy, and/or really badly acted, and it feels extra painful when you have to hear it over and over again. Every time you reload, instead of hearing it through the screen it comes through the Wii remote's speakers. The sound doesn't cut in and out like other Wii games, and so far it's the best sounding Wiimote speaker game I've heard.

Red Steel could have been a really good game, but with it's few extremely big bugs and technical annoyances, the game is nothing more than a game that game developers will learn from its mistakes. If they had cleaned up the controls a little bit, this game could have easily got a four out of five from me, but that takes so much of the fun out of the game that I haven't even thought of giving this a four.