I can hardly think of a better game to kick off the new year than Platinum Games' Bayonetta. Prior to founding Platinum, these guys have been responsible for such quality series as Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe, and with Bayonetta the team have greatly refined and built upon everything that made those games great.
The game oozes style from every pore, it's got constant, crazy, over-the-top action sequences, many taking place in unbelievable settings that will leave you awestruck. It's got a wacky story which manages to be utterly ridiculous while falling just on the right side of Incredibly Cheesey (something it does a lot better than DMC4), and will probably have you laughing out loud in at least a couple of spots, if only because what you just saw was so goddamn insane.
Oh, and it's got that all-important X-factor of the genre; kick-ass boss fights. Big ones. We're talking huge here people. I won't spoil any of them here, but the big-action moments in this game (and there are a lot of them) are early contenders for my best gaming moments of 2010.
To put it simply, Bayonetta is pure fun.
The game's biggest draw is of course, the combat. There's not a whole lot to say about it to anyone who's already familiar with this kind of game, other than that it is exceptionally good. As someone who's played and enjoyed the likes of Devil May Cry, God of War and Ninja Gaiden for years, I can comfortably say Bayonetta is probably the most satisfying and well-executed example of the genre I've played to date. The game is challenging while remaining accessible and avoiding the kind of brutal difficulty that reduced men to tears in DMC3 and NG2. Most importantly, it never feels cheap. When you die, it's almost always because you didn't time that last dodge right, or something similar.
There are 2 higher difficulties above the standard which I played on, which no doubt offer a much greater challenge for all the veterans of the genre out there.
Probably the greatest compliment I can pay Bayonetta is that after finishing up the game's fifteen chapters, which felt like just the right length, and being treated to the cool dance-video style ending, the first thing I wanted to do was dive right back in and do it again on Hard.
The game looks very nice, and the art design and animation is exceptional in a lot of instances. But the real stars of the show here are the locales in which some of the game's most epic battles take place. From the side of a collapsing skyscraper, to a wrecked boat in the middle of a massive sea-storm, to a monastery impaled on the side of a flying multi-headed dragon, to a vertical bike-ride up the side of a speeding rocket, to space. Believe me, the list goes on, and this is one of the main reasons Bayonetta will have you grinning and saying "Holy Shit" all at once.
The sound design is also excellent; the kind of catchy J-Pop-But-Still-Awesome tunes that play during many of the battles might not be for everyone, but they certainly fit the overall tone of Bayonetta very well, and I've gotta admit I've been humming some of them all day. And the mandatory epic orchestral-choir scores for some of the boss fights are pretty good as well.
Strangely, one of the soundtrack's main recurring tracks is a mix of Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me To The Moon", which frequently pops up in both suitably jazzed-up J-Pop form, as well as a more gentle version closer to the original, perfect for those heartfelt emotional moments.
This might sound bizarre, and it is, but it works surprisingly well and doesn't feel out of place in the game's setting.
The quality of the voice acting ranges from excellent (the titular heroine Bayonetta) to the fairly low standard we've come to expect from such a thoroughly Japanese game. But even at their worst, the characters never sounded offensively bad, and the writing-style is such that a totally convincing performance probably would have nullified a lot of the cheesey humour anyway.
If I had to sum up Bayonetta in a sentence, it would go something like: Ride a missile into the side of a building, slow down time, turn into a demonic panther, run up the side of said building as it explodes around you, while killing angels with the guns attached to your feet, before reaching the top and being confronted by a 100ft dragon with a baby's face for a head, which you then destroy by summoning an equally massive demon made out of your own hair.
And if that doesn't make you want to play a game, I don't know what will.
4.5 / 5
-EthanML
