Red Steel 2

The switch between weapons is instantaneous, and there's plenty of variety as you start to open up your sword skills and upgrade a small range of very pretty guns. In fact, combat has an almost unnecessary depth at times. Learning so many different gestures is somehow more difficult than consigning strings of button sequences to memory, but you can get by well enough with a few knockdowns, a finisher or two, and something showy and violent like the Eagle move, which blasts people rather amusingly into the air after a charge, allowing you to stick it to them on their return to earth.

There are problems, however. While I'm more than ready to believe that the basic sword move itself would be all but impossible without the MotionPlus in place - Red Steel 2 wants you to really swing, pulling the remote back over your shoulder and giving it some weight, which means the game spends a lot of time relying on information from the MotionPlus' innards alone - the game can still feel imprecise and compromised a little too often. If you're expecting a genuine revelation in terms of combat you might be disappointed.

There's a fair amount of lag when things get busy, meaning that even if there is one-to-one mimicking going on, by the time your moves are reflected on screen they're often already dissociated from your actions. On other occasions, in a real frenzy of activity, you'll actually see enemies registering your hits without the game having time to pencil in the appropriate animation. That's probably a better fudge than having it the other way around, however.

Despite these issues, Ubisoft has still been pretty smart. Most of the time, the developers know when to mimic your actions directly (blocking and basic swings) and when to simply allow you to pull off canned special moves by performing a general input which doesn't have that much in common with what you'll then see on screen. It's a decent system, but is does reinforce the predicament at the game's heart. Good swordsman titles still aren't really possible on the Wii because the technology still gets confused too easily, swapping the sides of the screen if you move too far back, or misinterpreting a few too many manoeuvres to ever truly earn your trust. And more to the point, most Wii players aren't good swordsmen in the first place, so the code will always have to step in and help them out, and thus the illusion will be shattered anyway.

Judged as a MotionPlus game, then, it's hard to get too excited about the future promised by Red Steel 2. Approached purely as an action title for the Wii, however, which seems like the fairer strategy, it's really not bad at all.

There's a pleasant up-grade muddle to lose yourself in, and combat can be brilliant fun once you learn to work within the system's limitations. The automatic lock-on is generally pretty intelligent when picking out enemies, while a full health recharge after each fight encourages you to treat every carefully orchestrated brawl as its own nimble little set-piece. And all of this is enhanced by an almost Halo-esque emphasis on throwing together various enemy types in challenging new configurations, tossing in a handful of straight-up grunts with a more powerful hammer-swinger, and some armoured Johnnygun idiots off to the side.

In the end, you'll likely forgive Ubisoft's game its shortcomings on the strength of its energy, obvious good will, and deep sense of craft. There are some thrilling set-pieces in here, along with moments that rank amongst the Wii's most beautiful, including a midnight rooftop race to catch a train which plays out under a huge cream-coloured moon. It's a lovely sequence.