I was a bit torn about purchasing this game as the original two games were some of the first games that I had played and the NES game was one of the first ones I purchased, sometimes nostalgia will make someone think a game is better/worse than it is. So for this review I am going to assume that you the reader has not played the previous games and have no feelings towards the original games.
This new installment of the Bionic Commando series takes place 10 years after the events in the last game released for the NES in 1988 (I think that is the first time time progressed slower in the video game than in real life!). Essentially you, Nathan "Rad" Spencer, are now in jail and on death row and your bionic arm has been confiscated. Bionics are now illegal and this has caused a rift between those who still want to use them and the government who says they are too dangerous. The exact events leading up to the jailing are somewhat unknown but you are granted a pardon in exchange for your services in scouting a city that has been recently attacked by unknown terrorists, with a nuclear weapon, and who are assumed to use bionics. Spencer reluctantly agrees to help more so in exchange for information about his wife who has been missing for 12 years.
After a couple training missions, one of which is actually a flashback to Spencer's original bionic training, the game gets under way. The first thing I will say about the game play is that if you are used to the way Spider-man swings in his games you will have a learning curve getting used to this bionic arm. The mechanics for the swinging are good but since Spencer doesn't have spider senses, he generally has to look in the direction where he will try to send his arm to get a grip to swing. Although this is a little awkward at first it really can give you an insane amount of control on how he swings as you can attach to almost any given point on a surface on which his arm can be attached. The gun play in this game reminds me of Lost Planet (wow both Capcom games, how amazing), but the guns are for the most part secondary to Spencer's arm. Once Spencer re-learns some of his moves, other than on the large enemies I found myself almost rarely using the guns. Using the guns while swinging was probably one of the more fun moves of the game, especially with the grenade launchers. Spencer can swing through the air and can shoot at any point while swinging and free falling. You don't have to be a sharpshooter to hit the enemies, just aim the reticule in their direction and when it changes to red, start firing! Truly all in all the game play was very good and some of the skills learned later in the game were just a blast to use on the enemies. One particular skill allows Spencer to extend his arm and whip it around in a circle and essentially for the standard enemies it is a one hit kill on any difficulty. My personal best was about 10 or 11 enemies at once (it was hard to count). The few boss battles were another highlight and were just downright fun. The only time the 4th wall is broken in the game is when Spencer looks at one boss and says
Spoiler: Click here to toggle spoiler"Whoa. Is that a big health bar or are you happy to see me?"
After pausing the game and laughing for 5 minutes, I had a heck of a time getting back to the boss battle.
One of the other interesting aspects of the games were the challenges. Normally I would save this talk for the "Achievement Whore" section but the achievements were very much tied into the challenges which added value to the game. Most of the achievement points in this game were for completing challenges. The challenges mostly were kill x number of enemies in y way (I love variables) with a few mixed in for doing certain moves with the bionic arm (swings, etc). However the challenges don't just unlock you achievement goodness, they unlock you other challenges and bonuses for your weapons, health and armor. Since there is no way to upgrade your armor and health otherwise, these actually become an important part of game play. The major downside to these challenges is that if the game has not saved after you performed a challenge, you lose credit for finishing that challenge. I'm sure the designers did this so that you couldn't just keep reloading a checkpoint where numerous enemies were located to knock most of the challenges out at once. Although this is understandable I did find myself screaming at the game when I completed one of the more difficult challenges and then died before the next checkpoint.
The graphics in the game were good and the backgrounds were awesome, I frequently found myself looking out from a height and checking out what I could see in the distance. The downside is most of the common enemies were constantly in radiation type suits and just didn't really seem to be that impressive. The mech enemies however were detailed and very cool to check out. The details were definitely a plus as there were plenty of points in the game something would be going on in the background, like a building coming crashing down, that made you really feel immersed in the environment.
My biggest complaint about this game was the dialouge/voice acting. Spencer is voiced by Mike Patton, lead singer of Faith no More, and he did an average job. The problem was that during the tense dialogue his acting felt very forced and frankly it didn't work for me. In his defense the script wasn't the greatest to work with, any dialogue between Spencer and Secretary of Defense D-Bag or whatever his name was, well it was bad. The Secretary obviously had no love for Spencer and vice versa, but unfortunately the tension just made it seem like Spencer was constipated as opposed to genuinely frustrated. The saving grace fortunately was the most vocal part besides Spencer was our good buddy Super Joe from the original games. Super Joe was voiced by Steven Blum who does a lot of voice acting for anime, including Vincent Valentine in FFVII: Advent Children. Super Joe by far was the easiest character to listen to and I rarely got irritated by his acting (except when the dialogue was weak).
For the most part the story was a good story, just with bad dialogue, and only at the end did I feel disappointed with the presentation. The main problem is that I didn't like what they did with the characters, as I had attachment to how the characters were years ago, and I felt there was a bit of a plot hole at the end. It made sense what happened, but they really should have explained it in a little more detail.
All in all I found this to be a good game. If you really liked the original games it can definitely skew your opinion on this game as the story definitely has some twists you wouldn't expect based on the original characters - the characters from this game are almost totally new creations. I give this game a 7.5 out of 10.
Wafflers/Completionists
This game isn't a terribly difficult 1k as the difficulty achievements stack (yay for stacking!) but I would recommend doing the challenges/collectables on the normal difficulty as you will get very frustrated when you die and lose credit for the challenges you complete. I was able to skip numerous enemies in the Commando difficulty which made it a lot easier. This game is an easy 700-800 points and is probably a 6.5/10 on difficulty for the full 1k.
