Bionic Commando Review
Bionic Commando is the old series returned, well sort of. You will be doing a lot of swinging through stages with your bionic arm, as well as utilizing it as a lethal weapon against your opponents. You have been in jail but have now been released to put a stop to an evil army that has taken over. You'll also be in constant communications with Joe, the man who made you who you are today, as well as the man that pointed the finger at you and had you put in prison.
Graphically this game stands up to most PlayStation 3 titles. Their choice of glossing everything with a bluish looking slime to notify the user it can't grapple there is odd. Though the truly odd choice is the radioactive gas that seems to inhabit random places within levels causing what looks like an open world to act more like a tunnel / very guided experience.
The music gives me fits of nastalgia, but its more of the feeling that the music is dated, and not that I'm all excited to hear it. The voice casting is hit and miss, and there's going to be phrases that you're going to have to get used to or you'll have to play certain parts with the sound off.
The controls are something that can be maddening and at the same time work for you. The problem is that you learn all these combos early in the game, and then once you leave that flashback you can no longer do any of it. Another thing is the grappling mechanics are broken. Sure from time to time you get a sweet swing in and things start to flow but there are other times where you're going to drop to your doom when you know damn well that you should be able to grapple.
This game seemed like a good idea, but the developers took it and broke it badly. Why give the gamers something that looks like an open world, but not allow for exploration? They took a cheap way out by using all that radioactive fog, and to make matters worse that stuff can kill you fast, even if you accidentally went into it. The problem then goes to the checkpoint system that seems to be random as hell. There will be times in sections of an area where, if you die, you'll get to start from there, but then there are other areas that seem to have the same idea but don't actually save the checkpoint for you and you're forced to do some tricky acrobatics and hope that you can not only get back to where you died but far enough to maybe finish the area (that will indeed cause a checkpoint). The gun play in this game is flawed. It just never feels exactly right, and as a result you might find yourself having to play sections over again that you should have been easily through. By the end of the game you're going to be thankful that the violence stops, not the in game violence, but the violence you've probably concocted as you curse like a sailor over the stupid stuff in this game.
Save yourself the trouble and skip this game. If you want the Bionic Commando experience play the classics. This game is a complete miss, and I have no regret when I say that this game deserves a 4.2 out of 10.
