Instro said:
To be fair, Red Steel was developed like a few months before launch. It was a completely rushed project. Killer Freaks has a year or more ahead of it.
Actually it wasn't rushed at all.
Red Steel was originally a 360 game called Killing Day, ported to the Wii along with the Unreal 2.5 engine. Furthermore, the Red Steel development team was also tasked with doing research & development work on the Wii controls, in the process generating code that went into everything Ubisoft did on the console. All of the above explains the game's oft-cited $12 million dollar cost, although in reality that figure includes the cost of HD development and technology R&D that would be used on numerous projects.
For the record, I enjoyed the original Red Steel. People complain about the huge bounding box (i.e. dead zone surrounding the cursor), but this was clearly a deliberate design choice. The result is that the game plays like and should be played like a lightgun game with freedom of movement between encounters. Notice how the level design, placement of cover objects and enemies support this point of view. In other words, it wasn't designed to be a fast run-and-gun shooter, and you are breaking the game if you decide on playing it like that.
For a similar critical reception, notice all the people criticising the gunplay in
Damnation, when in reality there is nothing wrong with this element of the game design. These complainers just don't get it. They want to turn the game into something it is not. They don't want to make any effort at mastering the game, rather expecting it to conform to their own preconceptions of what they believe it should play like.
I'm massively looking forward to Killer Freaks from Outer Space and Ghost Recon On-line. We already know from beta testing of the PC version that GRO is fantastic. Killer Freaks is however something never seen before, a concept with HUGE potential, and if it lives up to that potential I'll be all over it.
