Red Steel 2
Wii only, single player, Wii Motion Plus required
by Ubisoft
50 euros, or 60 with a Wii Motion Plus included.

Red Steel 2 has very little to do with the first in the series, Red Steel.

It might be described as a mix of genres, a bit of Kurosawa, a bit of Spaghetti Western, and a bit of science-fiction dystopia, Mad Max-style. The visuals give a strong impression of a comic book.

So, I am writing about this on the Wii Fit Forum, so the question uppermost in your mind is probably something like, "Does it help me keep fit?" And the answer is that it does, something like a 3.5 to 4 MET. I said that there is a bit of Kurosawa, and I was thinking specifically of the sword fights.

The story line, roughly, is that your character is a member of a clan of samurai in a Western-like setting, with katanas, six-shooters, radio masts, and trucks. And a bunch of big nasty guys trying to kill you, a gang called The Jackals. Fortunately there are people who will help you, including a sheriff who makes me think of a mix of the tavern keepers in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

Anyway, back to fitness. You go on a series of missions to rescue people, recover objects, and generally make a nuisance of yourself against the Jackals. In between these missions, you take part in training sessions in "the dojo", sometimes teaching you techniques that will help you with the next mission.

You are armed with a six-shooter and a katana. Some of the missions require at least some pistol-work, but many can be won with just the sword. And you must put some work into it. Some of your foes wear heavy armour, so your character has to hit them harder to crack it off, and to do that, you must put some real effort into your swings with the controller. It is in some ways similar to the sword games in Wii Sports Resort, but harder work.

To this, you can add a load of brain work: working out the best routes through the maps, devising the best attack strategy, and memorising a dizzying range of moves to make, Konami Code-style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code).

Last but not least, Red Steel 2 gets away from the crowd-of-mini-games effect. This seems to be a recurring criticism of Wii games, that they are in effect just a collection of mini-games. Indeed, even Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus suffer somewhat from this problem. Red Steel 2, however, does not. Despite a certain amount of repeated patterns, this game is clearly a single large game that tells an end-to-end story. This long-term goal should help motivate you, as compared to doing another round of jog, jog, bike, juggle, step.

My rating: 9/10

One last note: If you have an older Wii, the disc will offer to bring your system up to date. I did this, "rebooted" the Wii, then had to do it again, which made me wibble slightly - had it confused itself, or was I about to brick my console - but the second one did the business. It was, however, completely opaque as to what was going on.