You Damn Bionic Fool
When the demo for Bionic Commando hit Xbox Live, I have to tell you, I was disappointed. I’ve long been a fan of the series (and by series I mean the one game) and I have been looking forward to Bionic Commando for some time. But the demo was a dark, crowded, single-level free for all gankfest dominated by twitchy sniper one-shots and the brazen overpowered spray of one or two select weapons. The truth is that without the Bionic Commando name (and the good will that Grin earned by gracefully remastering the original title as Rearmed), I can’t imagine that demo selling any units. In fact, when I first played it, I couldn’t figure out why Capcom chose such a mediocre experience to demo such a highly anticipated game. Usually that’s a bad sign.
Well, I understand why they did it now, having beaten the full game on the maximum difficulty setting, and it has nothing to do with a lack of quality. The game experience itself is unimpeachable. It is consistently challenging without ever being cheap, well designed, balanced, and taking full advantage of all of the unique situations that its primary feature – the bionic arm – has to offer. The reason they threw everyone into a multiplayer zone during the demo was so that your opponents would suck as much as you do. Because when you first start playing Bionic Commando, make no mistake, you suck at it.
And I mean you suck hard. Even once you get the basics of swinging and targetting with the grapple down, once you figure out how to do some basic weapons aiming and how to take advantage of cover (though there is no inherent cover system), you will still be very bad at Bionic Commando. To be honest, I think I was about a third of the way into the game before I really got good with the arm, and I know that by about two thirds of the way through the game I was performing maneuvers that wouldn’t have even occurred to me earlier on.
The progression and skill curve of using the arm not just as a weapon (because it is a powerful weapon) but as a tactical tool to place your character where you want to be is constant. Even having beaten the game, I’m sure that a second play-through would continue to build on my technique. In short, it just isn’t something you could have ever learned in the span of a demo. And it puts the early previews, which all said that the game seemed cool but the arm was very hard to use, in sharp contrast. Those reviews were dead on accurate. And that’s a good thing.
If you go into Bionic Commando expecting to be able to swing from rooftop to scaffold simply by spamming your grapple button (which has been the principle mechanic in most other swing-based action games), you’re going to be frustrated. If you go in unwilling to treat the basic “grunt” enemies with a certain measure of lethal respect, you’re going to die a lot. And if what you’re looking for is Grand Theft Auto with a retractable claw, man are you going to be pissed.
And it’s the last part that surprised me the most – the game is most definitely not a sandbox experience (ala Spiderman 2). The levels are strictly linear, with waypoints clearly defined. If you attempt to venture too far off course, you will start to take damage and eventually get killed by radiation (the game takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear-style attack). This mechanic is a bit clunky at times, make no mistake, because there were a few occasions where I haplessly swung up into what I figured was clear skies only to die in the air with very little warning and almost no way to alter course. But this is nit-pickery at best, and exists only to highlight the single gameplay aspect that I wasn’t completely satisfied with.
The physics of the swinging are utterly flawless – once you understand how to properly control your character. And it keeps coming back to that element because the control is so very important. When you first start playing the game, you will spend a lot of your time hurling your character more or less at your objectives and floundering around mid-air because you let go of your swings too late. That’s quite normal. By the end of the game, I was using enemy hovercraft as swingpoints to grapple between buildings and riggings to dodge sniper fire without so much as a second thought. The curve really is that steep, but it’s also that rewarding.
As far as the combat goes, it’s surprisingly pure in its execution. I’d estimate, not counting bosses, that there are about ten enemy units in the entire game – and in some cases, that’s recounting the same unit if it’s armed with a different weapon. What sells the combat are the environmental situations they put you in when you are dealing with these enemy types. Sometimes you’ll have to take down mech-type opponents (who are impervious to normal small arms fire) without any sort of explosives. You’re limited to what you can use to damage them environmentally and how you can out-maneuver them with your arm.
Other times you will be put into a wide open space with limited cover and an array of deviously placed snipers – often without any long range weapons of your own. The challenge then becomes to travel from sniper nest to sniper nest at high velocity, because leaving yourself exposed and stationary will get you killed in literally three seconds. And eventually the game starts mixing up different combinations of enemy units and locations. And it’s the locations that are often important. Performing a wild dive down to a pack of grunts is a completely different combat experience from trying to assault them in a narrow tunnel full of debris.
Likewise, fighting a hovercraft (which can nearly one-shot you) on a series of scaffolds where you have to swing to avoid its exposives, but you also have to stay under cover to hide from a sniper, and you can’t advance too far forward or else you will draw attacks from the soldiers. . . it very much becomes a tactical experience. You begin to play a secondary metagame that’s all about limiting and controlling the parameters of the fight. And that’s when your progression with the swing mechanics comes into play. You simply can’t do all of that if your attention is 100% focused on the click-and-release controls of your arm. In fact, I doubt it’s even possible to beat this game unless you can learn to swing as comfortably as you would run or aim in most other games.
And that’s what makes it brilliant.
You can’t cheat the game. You can’t just hold back and pop every enemy from the other side of the board. You can’t always go in with the heavy explosives and splash-damage your way to victory. You don’t have that one cheap move that you can just use over and over again on everything that stands in your way – in fact, your most potent arm attacks also leave you vulnerable to other opponents. The game lacks one single I Win button, opting instead for a series of I Am Awesome buttons. But in order to push those buttons, you actually have to be awesome.
For those of you that never played the original (or Rearmed), there’s not really enough plot from those games to worry about. For those of you that care, the Chain of Command comic on the Bionic Commando website neatly bridges the old story into the new one, and sets up the major themes of the game nicely. Just about the only person I wouldn’t recommend this game to is the extremely casual gamer, because no matter how low you set the difficulty, no matter how easily bosses go down or how much damage you can soak before you die, the swing mechanics will always be there, waiting to be engaged and learned. They’re vicious and tricky – even deceptively difficult. You will reach what you think are zeniths in terms of your ability, and they will turn out to be minor plateaus at best. But the better you get at using the bionics, the more rewarding the game becomes.
In short, it is worth every last one of your sixty dollars. Go buy it.