Spring RTS Engine

Really awesome game, bombed at retail though. You play as a samurai cowboy and kill people with your sword and revolver (and a few other guns). Obviously that combo means great fun, block an attack, shoot them in the head and finish them off by impaling them with your sword. I'd suggest starting on hard, normal difficulty takes a long time before anything remotely challenging appears and even then you upgrade stuff so fast the final boss was a pushover for me and my HE carabine.

Can you freely control the way you wield your sword now - i.e. does it recognize how you move your controller and move the sword according to that (does it still have pure sword battles anyway)? This sort of was what I was expecting when watching the first trailers for the first game back then...

you are now aware this game is played by waving plastic sticks in front of a screen.

No, I believe I read the sword fighting is still restricted to 8 directional swings, but it is much more accurate now and there are probably special combos and shit that weren't possible before.

It's not really 1:1 but hell, it doesn't matter. It's a sword, the only way you want to use it is swinging it in a straight line. There's more emphasis on special moves now and there are no pure sword battles, you can always use your gun though some enemies aren't very vulnerable to guns (everybody is a jedi and can block bullets with their swords so enemies that tend to block a lot aren't easy to just shoot, many enemies don't block much so you can safely kill them from a distance if you want to forgo the extra money you get for sword finisher moves).

Actually, while numerous straight swings form the core of swordfighting, you often wish to curve or twist the blade... but this is beside the point entirely.

I'm hoping to pick up Red Steel 2 after my next paycheck.