Saturday 30 March 2013

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance

I already mentioned this once as the game that basically restored my love for gaming after 2012 ended up being so incredibly shitty, well now I'm going to gush about it!

So to start, I did a google search on the world revengeance, because I was convinced that was just made up to sound cool, but it is actually a thing, so straight off the bat I'm learning new things by playing this game.

Anyway, silly words aside, it's really quite hard to find a single word to describe Metal Gear Rising.  The best thing I can come up with is "Radical", but even then this games level of rad are so high that it doesn't really do it justice.

So I don't really know where to start with this "review", so lets start at the plot.  The game starts out with some group trying to destabilise stuff in order to cause war because war generates money for Private Military Corps and they like that.  Then it turns into a plot around child organ harvesting and shit gets really crazy from there.  But for the first time ever I didn't really give a flying fuck about the story in a Metal Gear game.  It's not bad by any stretch, but when there is all this high octane hacking and slashing going on, I just want to concentrate on that.

Which brings me to the game play, oh lord is it good.  The core game play revolves around hacking and slashing enemies until they die and if you have played anything like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, you can expect a combat system that's just as fun and rewarding.  The thing that everyone knows about though is the games "Blade Mode", where you are basically free to cut anything in any way and this is used to harvest spinal cords for healing yourself or killing big enemies.  This is also a really fun mechanic and doesn't interrupt the flow of game play.

Now for the blocking, because I've seen a lot of people complain about the blocking.  There is no dedicated block in Metal Gear Rising and instead we are given a parry which is performed by pressing forward towards an enemy and doing a light attack.  The parry comes in two flavors which is a standard parry which prevents damage, and a perfect parry which prevents damage and counters.  I saw a lot of people saying things like "it's not well explained" or "it's too hard to perform".  Please ignore these people because they are just bad at the game since the window for just pulling off basic blocks is huge and the game explains the controls behind a parry right away in a VR mission AND gives you plenty of time to practice.

Anyway, for all my griping about people slagging off the parry system, I'm not saying this game is perfect.  The final few chapters feel a little bit rushed and have very little length and it's a bit of a shame the second half of the game wasn't a little more fleshed out.  Also there are some quick time events and while they aren't too bad I'd still prefer it if they weren't there.  Also the stealth segments of the game are fucking crap and while they aren't mandatory it feels that they were shoehorned in there just because it's a Metal Gear game. They are incredibly out of place when just slicing up dudes is just as, if not more effective than sneaking.

Finally the length, I'll admit it is a little on the short side with my total playtime being six and a half hours on hard mode, but that's not counting cut scene time and I'm pretty sure failed attempts aren't included in the total time either.  That said the game is full of replay value, because my six and a half hours of playtime were filled with pretty crap grades, so I want to go back and improve my skills.  On top of that, beating the game unlocks another difficulty and doing it again unlocks an even harder one.  On top of THAT there are 20 VR Missions which task you with killing dudes as fast as you can for a big gold star.  Finally on top of THAT there are 20 collectable thingies to get throughout the game which only give stupid shit like concept art but are hard to find and for a completionist like myself, add some more replay value to the game.

So the TL;DR version of this entire post is, game is awesome go play it!  If you're a fan of action games like this who were left wanting after DmC, this will perk you right up.  If you aren't a fan, go play it anyway and you will be soon enough.

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