It has its flaws, but for a launch title it was 1) not bad, as reviewers had suggested and 2) quite fun with caveats. First, this game was universally panned when released. I don’t generally make assessments of a game without having played it or at least seen game footage; so when I first turned it on I immediately began wondering why this game was so ridiculed (and I think I wrote an entry to that effect). Having beaten it, I still don’t get it, other than to say it may be related to #2.
First, the story is forgettable and uninteresting. Thankfully, Ubisoft recognized this and didn’t inundate the player with useless backstory. There’s just to enough to explain that no, you’re not a crazed gunman on a rampage.
The FPS portions are incredibly fun. The Wii is well suited for FPSes, that is for certain. There were a lot of Ubisoft gimmicks thrown in for good measure though, as in unnecessary repetition of segements solely to lengthen the game and create an artificial challenge – but this game wasn’t ever going to be a classic, so it’ll be forgiven for that.
The game touted sword fights using the wii remote, but ended up being a huge letdown. The feel tacked on and are quite easy. Every enemy fights in a pattern, usually 3 slashes + 1 strong attack. Once you recognize that, the sword fights are irritating game flow killers. Sword fights are arbitrary. After killing several dozen bad guys, why would I fight a guy with a sword? Why not pick him off from a distance? It’s goofy and a waste of time.
You can also choose to not kill the person you’re fighting and gain respect points for doing so. Again, I just wiped out his comrades, why save him? Because if I don’t, I don’t get respect points, and without respect points I can’t level up. I’m not sure what leveling up did for my character, but I granted reprieve to everyone.
Another interesting idea that was badly implemented was the surrender system. When you go into focus mode (bullet time, essentially) you can ‘tag’ a person’s gun (shoot the hand holding the gun), waggle your wiimote and they’ll drop the gun. However, you can only do this in focus mode, which is built up by killing people.
Coinciding with this feature is that if you shoot someone is focus mode, sometimes it automatically puts them in submission mode (they’re willing to surrender, but the player hasn’t done the waggle bit yet). You can still kill them in cold blood, but there’s no penalties for doing so.
Onto good: for being a release title, the game is gorgeous (for a wii game). The character models aren’t 360 quality, but they aren’t nearly as bad as say Virtua Tennis 2k9. Scenery is nice to look at. Explosions are pretty. There isn’t tremendous slowdown, and when there is, it’s not during firefights (which, toward the end of the game, there are a ton of – non stop action). In terms of graphical quality, I’d put this game squarely between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2. I would’ve expected HL2 xbox quality graphics, but that didn’t happen here (tangentially, the wii may be faster than the xbox, but it has yet to make a game that looks better than an xbox game. Just sayin’).
This bears repeating, since it’s important: the Wii is great for FPSes. I thought Far Cry’s system was poorly implemented (even though it was an Ubisoft game, too); Red Steel’s worked well. There was no strafe, and turning was slow; the former is to be blamed on Ubi and the latter is an issue on every console.
The fun is in the actual gunplay: very rarely during the gun-kata do the controls let you down. This is the first FPS where I actually enjoyed (and preferred) using hand guns over assault rifles, just because the game conveyed an appropriate sense over how easy or difficult it is to aim and use such a weapon. And when Ubi piles on the firefights, it doesn’t feel tedious.
Ubisoft announced a Red Steel 2; hopefully they’ll learn from their missteps. In meantime, the Conduit drops shortly. It’s also an FPS but it’s one of those people versus aliens games; I’m not terribly fond of those.
Finally, on a very serious note: this game beat on the Wii’s drive. I’m pretty worried that it may have done permanent damage to the Wii; Madworld started having loading hiccups when at one time there were none, and when I stuck No More Heroes in, it started making a funny vibrating noise that it never made before. Also, the game caused the Wii to crash, presumably from overheating. It was Tetsuo’s level, where I left myself at the bottom of a hill while explosions were happening. Hopefully it’s not broken; we’ll see what happens.
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