Remember when the original Red Steel was announced and you were totally like “Holy crap I can swing a sword around and cut up some deserving Yakuza,” but then the game came out and all it did was register your motion as one of maybe three preconfigured attacks? I remember that moment because that was the moment I said to myself in true Arrested Development fashion “I’ve made a huge mistake” (in purchasing the game). With that bitter taste in my mouth I had no desire to hear about further Red Steel games, much less try them. I can see now, though, that Ubisoft must have planned all along to make the first Red Steel such a generic disappointment so that Red Steel 2 had a clear example of what not to be.

And it’s totally unlike the first Red Steel in the most important way: it’s completely fun.

The demo started off with the intro that we saw yesterday where the protagonist is being pulled behind a motorcycle by a guy who seems to have an unspecific but strong antipathy towards the hero. While this whole cinematic sequence looks amazing, you have absolutely no control during it aside from moving the reticule around. Once you get past that into the tutorial area things look a little less crisp than in the intro, but the cell shaded look works well with the rest of the style of the game. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s not something to complain about either. More important than the look, of course, is the gameplay. There was some familiarization tasks such as juggle-shooting a can and shootin’ the hinges off doors, but the sword and gun fighting is what it’s all about, right? Whenever you encounter an enemy you’re locked onto them like in the first game, but unlike the first game everything else doesn’t shut down for a boring scripted sword fight with someone. The clumsy hit-and-miss ballet of the last game is gone and fights in Red Steel 2 feel a lot like a first person brawler where you’ll lock on to one guy, dash towards him and get in a few good hits, switch targets and slash a little on the next guy, switch to a third guy and shoot him a few times, then parry an attack by the first guy before moving in for an opportunistic instant kill. It was hectic and fast and completely enjoyable.

Wii Motion Plus is instantly noticeable as that nagging lag between your motion and the game is gone. Everything feels like it’s 1:1 motion, but I’m not exactly sure if it is. The sword follows your direction perfectly when you’re just brandishing it or using it to parry, but the game requires such fast and wide movements to register a motion as an attack that I have trouble telling if it’s true to the motion I made or not. The important thing is that I didn’t care if it was spot on or not, it was accurate enough to do exactly what I wanted it to do.

So the demo took me through a repetitive couple of areas filled with three or four bad guys at a time before throwing out a miniboss which was just this big dude with a hammer(or sword, or something). I had to figure out the trick of getting behind him and attacking his weak spot while avoiding his retaliation attacks. Standard fare as it goes, but it still felt really cool when I would dodge out of his reach at the last second or did a flip over his head for an instant opportunity to attack him because it was like I was finally enjoying the level of cool immersion I’ve expected from the Wii since its launch.

Overall, the whole demo seemed to contain a lot of generic aspects in its enemy design and attack strategies, but the excellent manner of control and overall enjoyability of doing badass things as this badass character pushed any potential annoyances into the back of my mind. I can’t say if I would get more bothered by what could easily become repetitive gameplay hours into the full game or not, but as it stands now my first impression of Red Steel 2 is that it’s the amazingly fun sword/gun game I had hoped the first one would be.