Is Red Steel better than Goldeneye Wii? (with detours to other shooters)
(Originally written March 2010)
Sounds like an obvious ‘no’ right? At least that’s the impression you’d get from reviews that praised the reinvention of Goldeneye in 2010 and found Red Steel to be quite mediocre when it was released alongside the Wii in 2006. In terms of production values, presentation, and which feels more reminiscent of action movies then this is fairly accurate. When considering the actual gameplay though, there is something quite surprising that made me favour the gunplay in Red Steel for all it’s other flaws.
Admittedly I didn’t think much of Red Steel on release. I borrowed it from work and returned it the next day never thinking of it again. But hearing of Goldeneye wii’s promises, I was very eager to play a decent First Person Shooter on the console that felt like it had a lot of potential for them but had been unfortunate with the genre thus far. Buying into the hype a week before release, I killed some time with a friend’s copy of Red Steel and this is where I started to think “this isn’t as terrible as I remember”. Then on release of Goldeneye wii I could finally get the superior wii shooter. And that’s when my anticipation was left a little deflated, and I started taking notes…
The level design was pretty boring. There didn’t seem to be any creative thought over what would make a gun fight more exhilarating. The gunplay became uninspired, lacking any tension in blandly constructed battlefields masked as contextual environments. This is when I first started reflecting back to the seemingly mediocre Red Steel the week previous, which created some fun fire fights because much of what was around you was destructible. The enemies in 007 are very good at shooting you, but do you know what is more intense than getting shot? Almost getting shot. Making bullets feel destructive by setting up environments to be full of glass and other weak materials creates greater drama than the boring and frustrating fire fights of 007. Bullet-by’s are what reminds the player that they are in danger, and this is motivational enough to react to the situation accordingly, where as just plain getting shot leads to annoyance. It is more effective to be able to take less damage but receive more near misses than it is to take lots of damage and be a bullet magnet. So concrete environments don’t lend themselves well to shooters. Goldeneye wii looks much prettier than Red Steel, but the latter had a lot of chaos to dish out when the stray bullets start flying. I know which one I would prefer…
This is also great for shooting from the player’s perspective (and especially on the wii) as it’s a spray of bullets that rips the room apart that made Goldeneye 64 guns feel so powerful. This is why I despise a trend that Goldeneye wii has inherited: down-the-sights aiming. This mechanic streamlines shooting, narrowing the fire fight down to a dull and efficient shooting range and drawing attention away from the larger landscape of havoc in a way that feels contradictory to the chaos that goes hand in hand with action.
Fortunately, damage to enemies is nicely tuned resulting in only a few bullets to take down a foe, and this is an extremely important aspect to shooters that so many games get wrong. Take Black for example: It had heavily destructible environments reinstating the menacing power of a bullet thus giving great drama to the game, but it was full of enemies that could take 30 bullets to the chest, which destroyed the powerful illusion that the destructible environments did so well to establish. It was a huge contradiction that turned a potential classic into a misfire.
Another point for RedSteel was the multi-function nunchuck motion that not only opened doors and allowed you to melee like Goldeneye wii, but also reloaded the gun. Gimmicky as it may sound, this provided an understated immersive feeling as this is one of the more physical and “cool” things one can do in a gun game for wii. Motion reloading compliments the fierce action of changing a clip with intensity when under pressure. Throwing a grenade with the nunchuck whilst holding a button and aiming with the wii remote is also an efficient way to implement that simulated interaction, but at the sacrifice of movement.
Sound can be a huge changing factor in the feel and interpretation of a game. Sound effects are nicely designed in Goldeneye wii and they can be forgiven for some implementation issues for working under the wii’s restrictions. Dialogue recording is often too closely mic’d or not directed in the context of the scene which often takes players out of the experience in many games. Voice acting in games is not always the blame of the audio department as is often assumed by most critics. Voice actors can be directed outside the audio department and even poorly recorded conditions. Bad dialogue is also often mistaken for bad audio instead of writing and will affect the audio scores on games by sound critics anyway. One iffy sound area is that they recycle the dying cry of soldiers from Goldeneye 64 in Goldeneye Wii as a tribute. It’s a similar practice to film’s “Wilhelm scream” where the goal is to sneak the infamous scream into a suitable scene in a film as a subtle, unnoticed in-joke. But because the game repeats it’s own tribute scream constantly due to inherent, repetitive design, it only serves to break immersion for the player. Then hilariously after thinking this, there I heard the Wilhelm scream within a cutscene in the game, but as obvious as day, and confirming my fears all along: these guys just don’t get action the way Hollywood does.
The cutscene it was used in almost stood as an example of games not “getting it” or not taking storytelling seriously, and this is surprising considering the films writer was on board (says marketing). It was a recreation of the scene from the opening of the film where 006 is captured by the evil General guy and Bond wheels slowly across the room behind some gas tanks in a fantastically suspenseful scene. This recreation is flat in so many ways even when it uses all of the same elements right down to one soon-to-be-executed soldier’s sweaty, itchy trigger finger letting off a few rounds at the gas tanks after being ordered to hold his fire. This highlights the importance of storytellers/directors that understand the medium of cutscenes and gameplay and how to use them effectively to engage audiences.
Another missed cinematic opportunity was chasing the plane off the cliff whilst on a motorbike. Not only did this level lack any suspense even when barely interactive, it would have been a memorable experience to control the bike with the nunchuck analogue stick and then to navigate your freefall (linear as a kid’s slide but more effective than what exists in the game and don’t forget the Modern Warfare 2 snow mobiles, which were the best thing in the campaign). Now, this is easy for me to sit back and suggest when it’s easier said than executed, and I continuously complain that ignorant kids bitch this way on forums, but it was potentially not out of the question. Even though this is time consuming coding amongst other things, it is a moment we are just robbed of and all wishing we could have had. With an extended runway, it could have replaced the dull level that existed instead (which also had nothing to do with Goldeneye 64’s take on the level) therefore just being a different use of design time as opposed to extra design time. There are vehicle mechanics elsewhere in the game, which could have been built on and re-appropriated for this instance. I would even put money on the chance that this is exactly what the designers wanted to do but for some reason ran into some technical or time restraints, which is fair enough but still heartbreaking, and so I will ultimately not put this up to bad decision making.
The levels are designed so that players must also think about verticality when it comes to combat. This is usually a good thing as it is only starting to be explored more creatively (Uncharted 2, Bioshock Infinite), but not for wii remote First Person Shooters. The wii remote isn’t efficient for precise aiming and fast movement unless a ‘quick-turn’ button mechanic existed. Enemies will also quite often attack from all angles, which again is a design ignorant of the console controls this is for. Turning 180 degrees isn’t easy or fast. This is where Red Steel got it right: A forward, linear path is ideal for wii remote control. The corridor shooter died out when Halo hit the scene and glorified large open environments, but the old days provided some great fire fights thanks to a more focused experience and a feeling of enclosure.
I never had an N64 so I have no nostalgic connection to the original but I played it a couple of years ago and loved it even against modern titles. It’s full of great ideas that people have forgotten about, therefore modernising this to the generic status of a Call of Duty clone just feels like a waste of time, ruining it’s unique appeal. This also happened with Duke Nukem Forever. Although it makes sense not to rely on nostalgia in concern of being irrelevant in today’s market, surely the design mechanics that made the original a classic are a good idea?
Now lets look back at Red Steel in hindsight: It was a launch title, so that’s always a disadvantage. The wii remote was an entirely new controller and Ubisoft were the first developer with the gruelling task of working out how this would work with a First Person Shooter. When the wii was revealed, so was the game with an overly polished and therefore deceiving concept trailer, which oversold the game and is probably accountable for some reviewers disappointment. The graphics were ugly, the story pretty much redundant, and definitely felt like there were time pressures and budget constraints against it. What is the saving factor then? The gunplay. Turning off your brain, it can be a blast as you spray your uzi sideways and see the market stands and other scenery be torn apart as you almost deliberately miss your enemy for the drama of it all.
So for all of Goldeneye’s beauty and Red Steel’s ugly, it seems that there was a big difference in each of the game’s development, and this is enough to persuade most people. But when it comes down to the action, which is what these games are all about, there is some overlooked joy in shooting up the characterless world of Red Steel that didn’t exist in the lovely production values of Goldeneye wii. Go and revisit Red Steel next time you feel like a trip to a shooting range. It’s only a fiver these days.
