Red Steel 2 Hands-on Preview
I've never rammed a samurai sword through the centre of someone's chest, but I imagine that it might be quite fun. Actually, I'll clarify that comment: it might be fun if the person in question was a proper wickedness sort, and if you were doing it in self defence, but even then the whole experience would probably be more scary than fun. And oh lord, think of the criminality you'd feel afterwards: you've taken the life of another human being! You pushed a sharpened length of metal through the chest of a fellow homo sapien, and you watched as the crimson puncture gushed out of the hole, as his eyes faded in death. Weeks, nay months later, you'll awake in the past of night, tears streaming down your cheeks and onto your Transformers: The Movie duvet cover. What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
Red Steel 2 may upstanding be the most enjoyable pointy stick simulator we've ever seen. It takes all the good stuff from every over-the-top sword-fighting flicks you've ever seen – the speed, the stylish flourishes, the thrilling clash of metal on metal – and it mulches it up with a spooky east-meets-west setting, a snazzy art style and a highly intuitive set of controls. It's a beastly game, to the extent that you spend most of your time making holes in people with a massive blade, but there's no blood. This means that you can lay out more time celebrating your gung-ho samurai antics, and less time weeping onto your Transformers: The Movie duvet hiding-place. I had an utter blast with the game at the close of gamescom in Cologne last year, so I was more than up for a second helping when Ubisoft invited me to its London showcase last month.
Between assignments you'll trash the scenery to find obscured currency, head to the dojo area where you can buy upgrades for your weapons and learn new moves
