3 in 1 Game Review

Note: I'll fill in the gaps between my last post and now when I have more time - needless to say, went home, got sick, got better, started up school again, got busy, lost motivation, and now we're here.

Game 1: Bayonetta

I downloaded the demo from the Playstation store because there was a lot of hype about this game coming out from Sega. The story, as far as what I knew/know, puts you as a witch named Bayonetta who uses a combination of guns (including a pair that make up the heels of her shoes) and black magic to fight off angels and I assume discover the origins of her birth/re-live her childhood and come to some sort of dramatic conclusion. Whatever. The gameplay features a metric shit-ton of combination attacks, too many for me to remember so I just resorted to button mashing during combat, and some quicktime events to perform "finisher" type attacks. As for my major problem with the demo - besides the laundry list of attacks that felt like overkill, was the running attempt to make the main character, Bayonetta, into some perceived ultimate sex symbol. Look, when Laura Croft was first created she was just a hot chick who you played as while you ran, jumped, climbed trees and looked for treasure. Sega apparently found this to be too subtle and tries to sexualize all of Bayonetta's movements - something that will probably find favor with the 13-17 year old male crowd, but by the time you're my age it just seems gimmicky and annoying.

Result: won't buy

Game 2: Dante's Inferno

Another massively hyped release, with legendary source material so I was interested to give the game a try. What I found was something I struggled to get through in even a demo. The graphics for some of the scenes was just too graphic for me. Not lose your lunch disgusting, but enough that I didn't want to look at the screen. Then we got to the gameplay - as I started to play I had this unshakeable feeling that I had done all of this before, and I was right. Ever play God of War? Swap out Greece for the layers of Hell and there you go. Yeah I guess there isn't really much more for me to say. Like Bayonetta this game has already come out, and I'm happy to say that most reviews have also deemed it to be a mostly cheap God of War knock-off and it reviewed disappointing scores. Score another one for me.

Result: Will not ever play

Game 3: Heavy Rain

Okay, now this one I went into with high expectations, anticipation and a sense of dread. There are so many ways it can fail and since I want to like it, it made things tougher. I will say that while going through the tutorial and finding out that you have to hold down a button to walk was incredibly disappointing at first, and that the player movement is reminiscent of old school Resident Evil games, I found that through playing the demo this was just a minor inconvenience. The nature of the action doesn't require the quick, precise movements of a more complicated control scheme - the game is story driven and most of the important events occur during set cut-scene/quicktime sequences. The actions are performed in context, so there are no official button settings - i.e. X doesn't mean jump, in one scene it may dodge a punch from an attacker while in another it may be part of a button sequence necessary to successfully find your car keys. Additionally, the quicktime scenes are more like movie segments than your typical, pain in the ass "Press X to not die" variety and if you mess up you can usually recover. Also worth mentioning is that the game is dynamic, so different actions and choices affect the way the game/story unfolds. While questioning a source for information I was able to ask only a portion of the questions my character wanted before time expired. At the end, I wasn't sure if I had asked the right ones, and gotten all of the information I needed, but was unable to simply talk to the source again. This ambiguity was a refreshing change, it made me feel like the game required additional skill and thought compared to many of it's contemporary counterparts.

Result: Still waiting on reviews to confirm it's worth the price tag, but itchy trigger finger to buy