I can’t believe this game sold so damn much. At least 300000 people bought this. It might not sound like a really high number, but considering how bad this game is, it IS high. It’s from an unproven developer (who previously had only released a few games including PC ports of the GRAW games and… hum… that super crappy “Wanted” game), it looked crappy in the gameplay videos and, well… I have no idea why anyone bought this at launch instead of renting it. SURE, they did a GREAT job with Bionic Commmando Rearmed, but they had pretty much nothing to do there other than up the visuals and add boss fights. Oh, and not to mention they released the incredibly crappy Terminator Salvation games a day after Bionic Commando.

This is a “game that didn’t” on just about every front and is an insult to fans of the original.

Read on and see why.

Developer: GRIN
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: May 18, 2009
Platforms: PS3, 360, PC

Genre: Third person shooter
Players: 1 (more online)

Expectations
Well… the gameplay videos didn’t display any fun gameplay, with the shooting being awkward and the swinging never looking as fun and smooth as it should be. But I thought it might end up okay when you actually played the game. And the reviews, while not stellar, were still not completely negative. So after waiting a few months to try it out, I thought the hype/anti-hype would die down, and it did, and I could go at it without people talking about how bad it is, or how awesome it is.

Sure, the character designs were a major turnoff, and the gameplay didn’t look interesting, and I was never really hyped for this, but I was still happy to see a new Bionic Commando game, hoping it might be good. But, as you might’ve deducted from my introductory post, this game sucked.

Why it didn’t
Why did it suck? Well, there’s multiple reasons for that, so let’s break it down by points!

Controls
The controls are bad. Very bad. They’re unresponsive, sometimes requiring multiple button presses for Rad Spencer to move at all. When it is responsive, the hit detection is so laughable what you wanted to do might not even work anyways. The worst in this case is the swinging. Basically: You aim at something, and if it’s close enough(a cursor will tell you when it is) you grapple to it if you’re holding L2. That should be incredibly simple to use. Yet just about every time I have to use the bionic arm, it doesn’t respond properly. Sometimes it hooks me up to the ceiling when I’m aiming at an enemy, or it just won’t hook up to what I want. Sometimes I’ll be right next to something, I’ll aim at it, and the arm will never deploy, causing me to fall in water and die. When you do swing, you have an icon that appears to tell you what the optimal time to let go is, but sometimes it just makes you not move at all and just fall. Normal movement, not counting the bionic arm, is floaty and full of glitches.

The combat is also awkward, since all the attacks clase-range have stupidly low range, the arm doesn’t work well so using it in battle isn’t usually a good idea (unless you HAVE to use the arm). The weapons are usually the way to go. Strangely the basic pistol is by far the worst weapon. Its accuracy is lower than the machine gun’s, since the bullets just fly out at complete random from the gun instead of going straight whether you’re moving or not (yay for the laws of physics), it’s weak (unless you do headshots, otherwise  you do more damage with your fists). Aiming your weapons is slow and clunky, moreso if you go in “zoom” mode for slightly more accurate aim. Another bad element here is health. It seems like there’s no actual health system here. You have a random amount of health and attacks do a random amount of damage. Sometimes a grenade exploding right next to you will kill you, sometimes it will just hurt a bit. Same for gunshots. Sometimes 5 people shooting you at the same time will slowly bring oyur health down, while sometimes one person shooting you will kill you in a second. It’s completely random. That’s all there is to it.

The game just doesn’t control very well.

Stupid gameplay elements
This game is filled with stupid ideas here, so let’s crack down on a few.

First: The bionic arm. Well, it’s a fine idea. The arm enables you to swing where you want, go where you want to go, take any paths to reach the next area… right? Well, no. You’re almost always limited to a set path. Going off that path will bring you into “radiation”(wtf? why is it not everywhere instead of just random spots?), which kills you within a second. So if you find a faster way to get to your destination, you can’t take it. Sometimes even paths that look like you can take(since they’re just a bit lower that the “set path”) are plunged in radiation. There’s literally no freedom here. If there’s no radiation outside of a set path, it’s just because there’s a collectible close. Let’s add water to the problems here. Some areas are randomly full of water. If you want to go through through, you have to not touch the water. Getting in water, unless it’s shallow, kills you. You CAN technically get out of water by grappling to something and pulling yourself out, but when you’re in water you can’t see a thing and you have to be lucky to find something to latch on to. And sometimes even things next to you can’t be latched on to because the game just glitches out on you. Lame.

Another thing I hated is the radar. What made me hate it? One area in the forest. Well, there’s this door I couldn’t get into because it was blocked by an energy field. I look around for a switch or something, try to find a way to get around it(radiation killed me), nothing works. After about 10 minutes I just randomly go on a nearby island and find enemies that I had to kill(which I couldn’t see by zooming on the island, of course)… So why weren’t they displayed on my radar if I NEED to kill them to advance? It’s not hard to pass right next to them without seeing them, since I ended up doing just that 3 times. What’s the point of a radar/mini-map thing if it doesn’t display anything?

Story
Now this is laughable. A random terrorist group blows up a city, and Rad Spencer has to investigate. Rad Spencer, who is going to get executed at the same time(executed because he followed orders… nice), but his execution is stopped for this mission.

The rest is nonsensical and stupid (if the premise itself wasn’t bad enough). The characters are all one-dimensional and boring. The script is laughably bad, I could stop laughing because every single line sounded stupid. It feels like it was written by a 10 year old. I love how the first 2 conversations with the bionic legs girl are exactly the same… Really.

Overall
This game is bad. There’s so much bad about it, the good(wherever it is) is definitely out-weighed by it. By far. The swinging around mechanic, which could’ve made the game a lot more fun that it is,  barely ever work properly.

It’s lame, not worth playing. Nothing more to say. It had a lot of potential, but failed on every front.

Pros/Cons
Pros
- If you get the disc version, it can serve as an okay Frisbee, or you could break it (that would be much more entertaining than playing the game)

Cons
- Bad controls
- Bad physics
- Clunky combat
- Swinging is boring and badly handled
- Boring array of enemies
- Bad Character designs (just look at the box “art”)
- Boring story
- Characters aren’t interesting, or anywhere near likeable
- Hard for all the bad reasons
- Not as free-roaming as it should be
- Radiation kills you in a second (the fact that radiation exists in the game is bad enough)
- Water kills you (that’s acceptable in old NES  games, and MAYBE inFamous, but otherwise there’s no excuse unless the water is dangerous for some reason… but no, the excuse here is “the arm is heavy!”… why not use the grappling hook as a propeller or something?)
- No fall damage…. UNLESS the game wants you to have fall damage (what kind of sense does that make?)

The Save Factor
Pay only $10 if you REALLY want to check this out(AKA rent it). Otherwise don’t even bother.

jobocan Console, Games, impressions, PC, ps3, The Games That Didn't, xbox 360