Ok, to set up this story:
Although I didn't get a Wii, one of my friends was able to snag one from his pre-order at Toys R Us. So, I brought over the three games I bought (Zelda, Madden, and Red Steel) to play.
Now, we played Wii Sports for a bit (SO MUCH FUN) and then Zelda for a while (but the begining is slow and we got bored because it's really 1 player game), and then Madden for a bit (really fun too), but I was hesitant to put in Red Steel. I knew I could always sell it back, but I just wanted to see how it played.
The first fifteen minutes were ass. I didn't know what I was doing, the little red thingy was going all over the place, I couldn't aim, I was extremely dissapointed. Thirty minutes in, things were a bit better, and I was able to turn with some degree of decency.
To make a long story short, we ended up playing for about 2 hours. When someone lost, we handed the controller over. It's very fun, but the learning curve is STEEP. I've been playing games my whole life, and I usually can jump into any game and get the controlls down in a matter of minutes, but this wasn't the case for Red Steel. It both took us a good half an hour to get everything down, and even then there were still a few more kinks we had to figure out. But really, once the controls are down, it's really fun.
Glitchy, a tad flawed, but super fun. Zoom in works well, and stopping time is just a blast. Using the nunchuck to create cover is fun in a gimmicky, novel sort of way, but it still works. The environments are nice and destructable, which is always a big plus. AI is ok. They run, they hide behind walls, they'll sometimes blow stuff up (though I'm not sure if this is on purpose), but they work. They're not AMAZING, but they're not awful as Gamespot made them out to be.
Level design, from what I saw, was smart. Nice placement of cover, nice rooms for some sweet run and gun portions. The placement of objects is suprisingly nice, as well. More than once I've been able to blow some enemies up by shooting destructables.
Sword fighting is... odd. I realize that 1:1 is almost impossible (what are you going to do if you just keep your sword out there the entire time? What if you have your sword in the game knocked back?), but something just doesn't feel right. Then again, all I was doing was slashing around and attempting to block. My buddy was a lot better at it than I, that's for sure. Still though, I'm going to need to play it some more to see what I think.
Music is really nice, definately sets the tone. Voice acting and story are sort of über sucky, but I wasn't really expecting a lot in those areas.
Graphics... this is where it gets tough. Some of the areas I've seen are leaps and bounds above anything the Gamecube was ever capable over. Yet, some portions look like a mid-gen Gamecube game. Explosions are by far the best graphical effect, and the fire looks nice too. Some of the character models are sort of bleh-ish, and the art is ho-hum for most of the non-important characters.
I can say though that once we got into it, we got into it. It was definately satisfying. Just wondering what other people thought of the game. I might be the vast minority, seeing as EDGE gave it a 5.
EDIT: Should say half an hour, not half and hour.
Although I didn't get a Wii, one of my friends was able to snag one from his pre-order at Toys R Us. So, I brought over the three games I bought (Zelda, Madden, and Red Steel) to play.
Now, we played Wii Sports for a bit (SO MUCH FUN) and then Zelda for a while (but the begining is slow and we got bored because it's really 1 player game), and then Madden for a bit (really fun too), but I was hesitant to put in Red Steel. I knew I could always sell it back, but I just wanted to see how it played.
The first fifteen minutes were ass. I didn't know what I was doing, the little red thingy was going all over the place, I couldn't aim, I was extremely dissapointed. Thirty minutes in, things were a bit better, and I was able to turn with some degree of decency.
To make a long story short, we ended up playing for about 2 hours. When someone lost, we handed the controller over. It's very fun, but the learning curve is STEEP. I've been playing games my whole life, and I usually can jump into any game and get the controlls down in a matter of minutes, but this wasn't the case for Red Steel. It both took us a good half an hour to get everything down, and even then there were still a few more kinks we had to figure out. But really, once the controls are down, it's really fun.
Glitchy, a tad flawed, but super fun. Zoom in works well, and stopping time is just a blast. Using the nunchuck to create cover is fun in a gimmicky, novel sort of way, but it still works. The environments are nice and destructable, which is always a big plus. AI is ok. They run, they hide behind walls, they'll sometimes blow stuff up (though I'm not sure if this is on purpose), but they work. They're not AMAZING, but they're not awful as Gamespot made them out to be.
Level design, from what I saw, was smart. Nice placement of cover, nice rooms for some sweet run and gun portions. The placement of objects is suprisingly nice, as well. More than once I've been able to blow some enemies up by shooting destructables.
Sword fighting is... odd. I realize that 1:1 is almost impossible (what are you going to do if you just keep your sword out there the entire time? What if you have your sword in the game knocked back?), but something just doesn't feel right. Then again, all I was doing was slashing around and attempting to block. My buddy was a lot better at it than I, that's for sure. Still though, I'm going to need to play it some more to see what I think.
Music is really nice, definately sets the tone. Voice acting and story are sort of über sucky, but I wasn't really expecting a lot in those areas.
Graphics... this is where it gets tough. Some of the areas I've seen are leaps and bounds above anything the Gamecube was ever capable over. Yet, some portions look like a mid-gen Gamecube game. Explosions are by far the best graphical effect, and the fire looks nice too. Some of the character models are sort of bleh-ish, and the art is ho-hum for most of the non-important characters.
I can say though that once we got into it, we got into it. It was definately satisfying. Just wondering what other people thought of the game. I might be the vast minority, seeing as EDGE gave it a 5.
EDIT: Should say half an hour, not half and hour.
