For those who aren’t familiar with the original 2D sprite game, Bionic Commando takes the foundation of the characters and mechanics of the original game and modernises it in nearly every way, shape, and form. And to give you an image of how the game’s turned out, think Spider-man 2 meets Crackdown, but with a little bit more emphasis on linearity.
The character you play as throughout is a Bionic Commando called Nathan Spencer, and the basic plot is fairly typical of an action platformer title of this kind. Basically your character’s about to be executed for supposed crimes against the government, this is until a radioactive bomb goes off in the fictional city of ‘Ascension’. You have the advantage over the situation with a bionic arm and the sensitivity to radiation allowing you to see where it is, you’re thus set free with the simple mission to save Ascension city from the terrorist threat called “BioReign” that caused this atrocity; I think you see where this is heading.
This interesting yet rather ludicrous plotline is told through a number of in-game cut-scenes that come up between missions and from random triggers during them. Not much really can be said about these cinematics except being fairly well choreographed but in a B-Movie like fashion, although as they’re quite cringe-worthy I don’t think you’re meant to take them too seriously.
From what I played of the singleplayer portion of the game the settings based themselves almost completely around urban/city environments, and after asking whether the environments change at all I was told all the missions are within Ascension city. That may seem to be a bit of a bore if you think about it in a simple sense, but there is a lot of potential and room for a great variation in level designs if done correctly, from what I played I hadn’t experienced that, but I only really played the tutorial and a mission or so of the singleplayer game before jumping into the basic yet hectic multiplayer game.
I thankfully played the tutorial thoroughly before throwing myself in the deep end with this game – as I usually do with others. The game mechanics of Bionic Commando escalate almost entirely from your bionic arm; there are many tricks you can pull off with this large embodied gadget. Its main use though is to get you about the long distances you have to travel, and the high levels you have to pull yourself up to, and to do this you use the arm grapple that is built into the bionic side of your body. By pressing ‘A’ to jump, then ‘RB’ to fire your grapple you can lock onto almost any extrusions from structures, and the sides of buildings themselves, then using the physics engine you can swing yourself up and down until you get enough momentum to hurl yourself and latch on to another point. This is the quickest and most fun way to transport yourself around Ascension city, and sometimes it’s the only way. Due to the explosion of this bomb there are impassable zones; a mixture of craters and clouds of radiation, and so you have to use the surroundings and your grappling arm to divert around certain areas. I was glad there were parts like this as the combat elements in this game - albeit heightened with the grappling arm – got a bit mind numbing after a while, and that was after playing just two missions.
You can make for some interesting fights in this game, there are guns, and if you want you could go most of the way through shooting every enemy, but that would be very boring and uncreative. To push this game to its real potential you could grapple guys towards you and then hit ‘B’ or ‘Y’ and thump them with your bionic arm, or you could fall from a tremendous height – as heights don’t affect you at all in this game – and hold ‘Y’ and make the ground tremble with a mini earth shatter, it clears any enemies in close proximity around you.
Exaggerated abilities like those makes Bionic Commando satisfying for a while, but having brainless AI flying about in result of your Bionic arm is no way near as fun and interesting as doing the same to any human folk playing, and even better when they’re all in the same room as you.
Multiplayer allows up to 10 players for standard death-match, team death-match, and CTF modes via Live or system link, this might not seem like many players, and the modes may cause you to yawn, just hearing them now, but the mechanics this game entails gives a unique and highly addictive multiplayer game in each of these modes.
The first mode we played was the death-match on a very small dark industrial themed map, featuring lots of high points and re-spawning weapons to play about with. Multiplayer gives you most of the abilities in singleplayer, but this time obviously everyone else is able to grapple around and super smack you with a mechanical arm, so you can see why it all ends being chaos. There’s also not much in the way of subtlety or covert attacks as the developers have chosen everyone to have florescent primary colours as skins, so the level could be pitch black yet you would still see someone trying to swing themselves towards you desperately trying to hit you with their robotic am, or blow you up with a grenade launcher, it’s almost like GRIN want it to be chaotic...
Most of the weapons I encountered were through the multiplayer modes, and they consist of the standard types from the basic pistol, rifle, light machinegun, grenade launcher, and sniper rifle. I think there was one of each category; but there may have been two types of pistol... fascinating. It’s safe to say that the long ranged weapons in this game are particularly lacklustre, but when you’re trying to use one while moving through the air at who knows what speed, then you don’t particularly care about the effects as long as it does the job.
Team death-match is how you expect it to be, up to five people on each side thrown in a level with random weapons, random spawn points, and let loose on one another. This wasn’t quite as fun as death-match for the simple reason it means less killing and more of a competition on who can get to that struggling stranded enemy, there isn’t any team work really, understandably from a game of this temperament. And then lastly, you have CTF (Capture The Flag), which on the level we played was oddly massive in comparison with the two previous maps we had already played on, this could have been a CTF exclusive map, or at least it should be, as even for CTF it was large. It was a long canyon based map, and on each end you had the team’s flag base, at the bottom was a river and for some reason bionic commandos don’t like water, so essentially you’re frantically grappling your way around the whole map. I think it was agreed generally that this was the least enjoyable of the modes, as everyone was in the mood for just targeting enemies instead of defending or capturing the flags at hand, I think this is partly due to the nature of the game and the learning curve of the controls. It is tough to traverse yourself around the map and defend yourself, to add to the problem by putting a couple of flags into the equation can only make it even messier.
Bionic Commando at its current stage was definitely a near final build with just a few polishing touches to go, I didn’t experience any glitches or graphical errors which is a good sign, but I do feel the controls could do with some tweaking with the button layout for changing weapons, and the grapple when using it for movement.
For a game that I had barely cared about just a few weeks ago, and a game that is nowhere near as hyped as Street Fighter IV or Resident Evil 5, I was very impressed with what I had experienced. The game’s chosen style has translated well to current gen, and the combat/movement mechanics mixed with the very platform like genre is welcoming indeed.
Bionic Commando probably won’t make your jaw drop in amazement, but where it’s heading and from what I’ve played of it, I can see it being a valuable asset any action/platformer gamers out there.
Bionic Commando is coming to Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. For consoles in NA May 19th 2009, and for EU May 22nd 2009. PC will be seeing a later release of June 2nd.
Preview By: Lee Burton
|
|
