Bionic Commando

Oh Bionic Commando, what wonderful memories I have of… okay well I’ll be honest, I never played the original, and I have no intention of doing so. Which is just as well because this game has about as much in common with the original as Metroid Prime did with its namesake. In this game you’ll take on the role of… uh… wait for it… I’ll get back to that. Anyway, you’re some dude that’s about half the size of the guy that is used to impress you on the cover of the box, but you do have borderline offensive dreadlocks! One day at some random point in time before the game started you thought it’d be a good idea to jump on a live grenade and it blew the shit out of you. Luckily the government had bionics for commandos such as yourself (get it?!).

You play as Spencer, which I had to actually look up his name, because as you may have been guessing, the plot in this game ranges from utterly forgettable to downright asinine. There’s a short cutscene at the beginning of the game where your character is pulled from jail by Spike Spiegel, who shoves an arm roughly the size of a mini cooper on you, and kicks you out of a plane. Your character does his part with the upsetness and the badassery, there’s plenty of finger poking and some yelling, but I don’t really recall much, even though I played through it last night. Just ignore it. You’re doing this for some love interest that we never meet and, despite her title, we have absolutely no interest in. There’s some other chick that runs fast, and is actually a teeny tiny bit cool, but her onscreen time is a total of maybe 50 seconds. You play through level after level with Spike, I mean Joe! His name is Joe! Joe blares out instructions in your ears and you have absolutely no choice but to do exactly what he says, whenever he says it. And just when you are really starting to hate Joe, they introduce some Admiral something or other, who makes Joe seem like a decent guy in comparison. There’re these bad guys that are bionics, but they’re like Nazi’s or something too, and they have a big drill for some fucking reason. I don’t know, I’m going to get off the plot now, it’s best not to think too much about it, they obviously didn’t.

So you’re basically the reluctant badass that stars in 95% of video games today, except you have one of Doc Ock’s arms! It let’s you swing around like a monkey on steroids, pull and throw anything roughly equal to or smaller than a train car, and generally beat the piss out of everything in sight. If there is one thing I can say without a doubt about this game, this was the most fun Spiderman game I’ve ever played (no I haven’t played Spiderman 2). The game really peaks in the middle, which isn’t all that uncommon, but I had a really hard time liking this game, and when I finally got into it and was having a blast, I round the bend and started hating it again.

Swing you goofy bastard, swing!

Let me take a minute here to put some of the following in context. I was about a quarter of the way through the game when I realized there’s a zoom button. Now you will spend the majority of the game beating people up with melee… or quasi-melee, but at the beginning the only arm move you have is punch in face or grab, which is HORRIBLE. You have your pistol though, only problem is the reticule takes up about half of your screen, and you get about 6 shots until you run out of ammo. However, upon zooming, you’re now rocking a Halo 1 sniper pistol of win… that gets about 6 shots. In short, ZOOM.

The gunplay in the game is well done most of the time, the only problem being ammo and the way it’s handled. You have your pistol, your grenades, and another random gun that you have to drop to pick up a new one. Some of the guns are fun, the grenade launcher, rocket launcher and machine gun are a blast, but they’re all short lived. There’s basically no ammo for them other than when you first pick them up, so a lot of times I found myself rationing my ammo to the point where I hadn’t even fired it when I got to where I needed to pick up a different gun.

About halfway through the game you learn the ability to pick shit up and throw it at other shit. This is where the game ramps up considerably. Now instead of struggling with 2 to 3 guys at once, you’ll be taking on packs of 5 to 10 (relatively) easily. Most of combat from this point on will consist of picking up dude, and either team rocketing him into the horizon, or slamming his face into another dudes. There’s other elements yeah, you can jump up and do this kick propel thing into bad guys, jump from high up and do a ground pound shockwave thing that seems mandatory for games these days, or latch on to someone and jerk them back to you so you can insta-kill them by… I don’t know, carelessly tossing them aside? But most of these you’ll just do for fun because you can just grab guys and throw them about 2½ miles away into a brick wall.

Someone’s about to get Swiss Cheesed by snipers.

This is not to say the game is by any means easy. Au contraire my friend, this game can be extraordinarily, self-hair-removingly difficult at times. The problem I have with the “difficulty” of the game, is it almost seems like the developers sometimes would make an area more “challenging” by just spreading the save points farther and farther apart. In the middle, I was fighting in an underground tunnel, and had to kill I believe around 20 guys. There was a save point right before it, and immediately after it. It took me a couple of tries, but no biggy. Later on in the game there are some horrific encounters where you have to kill an upwards of 30+ guys including several snipers and flying monkey robots, with no save points in sight. So when you die, as a throwback to the NES days, the game says ‘Fuck You!’ and boots you back and makes you do it all over again.

Let’s talk about bad guys and level design for a bit, because they both fall under the umbrella category of ‘How much shit can we reuse?’ There are 3 bad guys in the game, not including bosses, there’s infantry, snipers, and robot monkeys. There are infantry guys, and they’re either orange, red, or brown, in ascending difficulty. Orange have pistols and die in about 4 shots from your pistol, while brown have basically miniguns and take about 20 shots to kill with your pistol. It should be noted however that all 3 versions can see you from a mile away and have about 137% accuracy. The snipers are the same guys from Halflife 2, who like to attach giant laser sights to their rifles so you can see where they’re aiming. And there’s big monkey robots that have a weak spot on their back, but by the end of the game you’ll be killing them by throwing cars at them so the weak spot is swiftly ignored. Oh, and some monkey’s can fly for some reason, and some can fire Hadoukens, again, reason unknown… but they all have shotguns! Joy!

Levels… hmm, let’s see, there’s the destroyed streets, the cave, the forest, and the garden. I think that’s all of them. You will go through each of these levels at least 4 times. Overall they’re fairly pretty, and there are some moments when you can look out over the city, or into the distance over a waterfall and your jaw might drop, just a hair. Then you’ll remember that you can never go there and it probably doesn’t even really exist and you hate blue radiation. Oh there’s a fun one. The ‘walls’ in this game are defined by radiation, which makes stuff turn a kind of sparkly blue that’s not overly noticeable, and kills you at a speed ratio depending on how far in you are. So say you accidentally set foot in it, you have plenty of time to get back on the right path. But say you were swinging to a building that’s irradiated but you were unfortunate enough not to notice before you started your mighty arc through the air. Well, you’re going to die in about 2 seconds, long before you ever get to your doomed destination. Overall the levels do look pretty, but they’re just so repetitive that it’s really hard to give any props.

Before I wrap things up I also have to get a couple last gripes out. I played this game on the PC. I spent the first 99.9% of the game wondering how anyone could possibly play this game using a joystick because as I swung from building to building it was challenging enough to aim my claws next destination with speed of a mouse and the aim of someone who plays first person shooters relatively frequently. As I was soaring through the air and clawing guys midair to zip kick them I thought to myself, how the hell could anyone do this with a controller.

Yep, this is the PC version.

But, on the other hand, the game is such a blatant 360 port that I HAD to try it on a controller. I mean, it puts the ABXY buttons in the middle of your fucking screen on the PC version. The controls on the PC version are shit! Absolute shit! X bound to left control, left trigger bound to right click, A to Space, B to F… they’re fucked. But there’s not much you can do about it. It took me an hour or two, but if you can finally get over the keyboard and mouse controls, you’ll be the better for it. As for my gamepad, well it turns out the game decided you should push Start or Enter to continue, but Enter is not Start, and Start is not Escape, Start is Tab… oh and you can’t rebind start. Okay, who needs a start button anyway! Oh that’s right, you can’t rebind look to anything. You can move and attack and all that fun stuff with your pad, but you still have to use your mouse to look around? Well I went into my gamepad software and made the right joystick emulate the mouse pointer, and ran around for about 12 seconds before I remembered that no one should ever be forced to aim a gun with a joystick.

Ah, but I have left a question unanswered, about the claw swinging. Well in the final sequence your targets are nice enough to rush by so fucking fast that there’s pretty much no way you can manually use your claw on them. After failing to grab a target twice, finally managing to get it then failing one of the quick time events where you have to hold right and smash the B button as quickly as possible (if you’re curious, that’s holding D and smashing F on the keyboard… yeah…) I remembered that you can just hold the claw button down, and your character will grab on to anything (and that I should tap F with my right hand, or I’d never hit it fast enough). I think this is probably what makes swinging with a controller bearable, but your dude tends to have about 1700 things targetable on the screen at any point, which is why I promptly forgot you could hold the button as soon as they told me.

It’s not the power of the graphics, it’s how you use them!

So, my conclusion? Let’s break it down as though the star system Andy has set up actually works.

Gameplay 2/5: It’s so very almost fun, and just when it seems like it’s got a grasp on itself, it shoots itself in the foot. Between some terrible combat sequences, some stupid arbitrary platforming deaths (water? really?), and the worst save system I’ve seen in a long time, it just can’t quite overcome its own problems.

Looks 3/5: I sense a lot of reused graphics here. Honestly the only thing in the game that isn’t genuinely beautiful is the main character (Really, how can he even stand up? His arm is bigger than him!) You’ll just be seeing a lot of it all, to the point where you stop noticing or caring.

Noise 4/5: Overall the sound is above average and teetering on being very good. Music is good, and I like all of the voice acting except the big bad Nazi, no biggy, and the main character, problem.

Addictiveness 3/5: Bionic Commando had a hard time drawing me in. I couldn’t say what it was exactly, it just wasn’t FUN at the beginning… but as I got in deeper (read: started throwing people) the game really took off. Act 3 however brings it to a screeching halt, it’s the shortest act, but don’t be surprised if you spend the most time here. (Yay! I died again!)

Replayability 1/5: Nope, none, nuh uh. Okay maybe there’s a little, there’s these puzzle, 8-bit… things, scattered through the maps, there are also challenges that you do to unlock stuff. But between the game not being that fun in the first place, and the fact that if you miss something you CAN NOT go back and get it, you have to completely start the game over, you’d have to be quite the masochist to try to 100% this one.

Overall: 2/5

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