The game follows the mute protagonist Scott, as he battles loads of Yakuza thugs and gangsters to get back rescue his girl Miyu, and to take back the honor that was Sato’s, the father of Scott's girl. The story is a bit straight forward, but pretty decent. A rival Yakuza gang makes an attempt at Sato's life, and kidnaps Scott's girl in the process. So it is pretty basic.

The same goes for the gameplay. While it may seem that your regular run of the mill, no holds bar shooter, the game is saved by it's new way to play, which is by using the Wii remote and the nunchuck controller. It is basically how you would imagine it to be, point and shoot. There is also the sword fighting segments, that while gimmicky, it is certainly a good start to hack and slash games to come.

Throughout the whole game, you will be seeing locales that are reminiscent of Japanese culture, as you will be lingering in Lil Tokyo as well as Japan itself. While the environments aren't the most detailed, there is still some life, such as dojos, bars, city streets, etc. Did I mention there is a huge amount of neon lights? Well there is that too.

As mentioned before, the gameplay is pretty standard. Point and shoot, and the reality of that is, that there isn't much else than that. You will of course need to say, find cover, you can flip tables for cover by shaking the nunchuck attachment, open doors by shaking the nunchuck attachment, pick up weapons by shaking the nunchuck attachment, well you get the idea. To spice things up a bit, the game has a sort of bullet time esque ability. You can freeze time to get some easy shots, and you can do it to more than one opponent. I found it particularly useful when fighting against many enemies at once, it always makes me happy to bust some caps in people's heads, then disarm the last person. Oh and there is a respect meter where if you spare your enemies, it will go up. I am not sure as to the full extent of this, but from what I know, they will drop their weapons faster if you have a higher respect level.

The sword fighting uses the nunchuck as well. While holding the C button on the nunchuck, you can dodge left and right. You can also parry your opponents' attacks by making a motion at the same time your opponents attack. If you get it right, they will be thrown off balanced and be open to attack, if not, then a simple block will happen. The Wii remote acts as your sword, swinging it will make Scott swing, pretty simple. You also learn new combos throughout your adventure, although basic, it does help

The graphics are pretty decent. While character models may seem like it came out of a game from the year 2003, there are items that can be broken, walls that will shoot off smoke when shot, your cover will be destroyed if you stay there to long, etc. The cutscenes are also a bunch of Max Payne esque comic book style cutscenes, it kind of looks like if there was going to be cutscenes, but the developers got lazy and went with this instead, decent, but it could have been better.

Multiplayer is pretty basic, there are only 4 maps to play on and there are only three modes of play, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Killer mode. Killer can only be played with 4 players, but it is at least unique. You are given an objective through the speaker of the Wii remote, and you can only go through those objectives and in some cases, they are rules. One way this works, is that you can only go after one person, and you can only kill him by shooting him in the head.

The voices are pretty good for what they do, but at the times, they just flat out suck. Things like DIE YOU BASTARD or MURDERER are repeated, while other people won't mind it, it does get rather annoying, but it doesn't take away from the game play experience. I also think that whoever was the composer of the music should get a damn award, the music is excellent. It ranges from J-pop, hip-hop, rock, classical, and literally, elevator music when you enter an elevator. I am still waiting on the soundtrack to be released

Now onto the bad things about the game. At times, the cursor of where you are shooting will just go awry, and start to bounce for some reason. Also, the sword fighting gets annoying, because at times, you are shooting, shooting, and shooting, then for some reason, you go into a sword fight. While it may seem fun at first, it gets annoying after awhile. There is also a lot of glitches in the game, a couple of times I saw my enemies floating in the air, and there was one particular incident where it seems as if he was about 35 feet in the air, still shooting at me, although it was funny seeing him fall from there. There is also the fact that when you are sword fighting, it sometimes doesn't seem to detect right. Most of the time, I had no problems, but there is the occasional problem.

Overall, in my opinion, I think it did live up to the hype. Simply because I knew what I was getting, a new shooter that sacrifices originality for a new way to play. While it may not be the great game that is Twilight Princess, it is still a great game, and one that you should check out, just one word of advice though, if you do buy it, fix the sensitivity level to your liking, because the default might piss you off (like it did to me)

Overall: 8.3/10