Metal Gear goes hack-and-slash to create one of the best games in the franchise
What Is It? I’m not the person you want judging the coolness of anything, my kids are very quick to remind me of this on a regular basis. Thankfully, it does not take an expert to recognize that Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (MGR) is one cool video game. You play as a cyborg ninja and spend five to seven hours slashing through countless hordes of enemies with blood frequently spewing in every direction. The game constantly propels you forward to the next fight, the action doesn’t stop except for the classic Metal Gear cutscenes.
MGR is cool, we have established that, but what is it? It is a spin-off from the Metal Gear Solid series with a heavy hack-and-slash action lean. Some of the MGS threads still live on in the alert system, stealth kills, and general tone and vibe. Oh, you also play as Raiden. You will spend the game traversing through linear levels, with a little room for exploration and finding optional fights. Find some enemies, destroy them, move onto the next. Massive boss fights are mixed in, as well as a handful of cinematic sequences where you do things like run up the side of a building with missiles exploding all around you.
Combat is the focus of the game, the hack-and-slash system here features light and heavy attacks and a unique parry system. There are weapons/items such as rocket launchers, grenades, and cardboard boxes, but the mechanics of using them were so slow that I rarely tried during my playthrough. The game does a poor job of explaining parrying, but forces you to learn in an early boss fight. To parry, you must be standing still and press the left analog stick and the light attack button in the direction the enemy is coming from. This will engage Raiden in a brief parry stance, blocking most attacks that occur during this time.
Parrying is tough to pull off while you are getting mauled by three large robots at once, but it is necessary to make progress in the game. Blade Mode is the other key feature of combat, this allows you to slow time and slice up opponents with as many slashes as you can connect with while the Blade Mode meter depletes. Blade Mode is fun in that it allows you to slice opponents into 100 tiny pieces, but also serves the strategic purpose of allowing you to take out weak limbs of larger enemies and also triggering an instant-heal effect by ripping out an enemy’s spine. See, I told you this game was cool.
The game keeps you moving quickly from fight to fight without a whole lot of down time in between. There are quite a few Quick Time Events (QTE) here, which is definitely a sign of the times. Personally, I enjoy a good QTE so I thought it was a fun addition, but be warned that missing them in certain spots are often instant deaths. The good news is that a death in MGR will respawn you almost immediately before the spot you died for an instant retry. This is important because you will likely die a lot.
Between levels you can use points accumulated during combat to upgrade Raiden. Stronger attacks, special moves, more health, etc. You also get graded on individual combat encounters as well as full levels. Not that I needed to have the game point out that a rough fight sequence was rough by assigning me a ‘D’ grade, but it is a fun system to give perfectionists something to chase.
The Best Part: As you progress in the game, you will unlock new moves. Typically, in an action game, when new moves are unlocked that means new button combinations to memorize, but not here. Your new moves are automatically pulled off as you are mashing your two attack buttons in normal gameplay. A few aerial attacks trigger when you jump as well. This seamless integration of more powerful combat moves without the overhead of complicated button combinations is extremely refreshing to see in a game like this.
The Worst Part: There are a few key difficulty spikes in this game, mostly in the form of really tough boss fights. For many, this is a feature, not a bug, but I feel this is the one part of this game likely to turn the most people off. A very early fight is designed to teach you how to parry, but it took me a dozen or more tries to get right. There is a small gauntlet-like fight later that is long and difficult, along with a few other very tough fights up through the end. It is all good fun if you want the try-and-die challenge it offers but is also wildly different from what other games in the Metal Gear series offer.
The Verdict: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance does exactly what it sets out to do: pulls the world established in the Metal Gear Solid series into a hack-and-slash style game without letting its foot off of the gas over its relatively short playtime. The game is a resounding success on all fronts. It is an extremely fun action game that manages to stay difficult and unique without overwhelming the player with button combinations to memorize. The occasional mix of QTE and run-and-dodge sections give just enough variety to keep things interesting. The boss fights are massive, unique, and really tough. All of this adds up to a game that I enjoyed more than many of the Metal Gear Solid entries (no, not that one).
How to Play: PlayStation 3*, Xbox 360, PC
*console played on for this review
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