Rehashing successful arcade games is all the rage these days and I’m all for it – especially when the source is a game that I thoroughly enjoyed back in the day. Granted, I was stuck playing the piss-poor Amstrad CPC 464 conversion (in glorious monochrome) when I was a lad, but the fact that I have such fond memories of Bionic Commando is testament to how good it was.
The Xbox Live release of the 2D Bionic Commando: Rearmed a month or two ago was obviously going to be closer in feel to the original, with this new Grin-developed third-person effort being more of a spiritual successor. Fortunately, the essence of the original game has been nurtured to provide a generally entertaining if somewhat flawed experience.
I won’t even start on the storyline, as it darts about so much from one thing to the next that you’ll be hard-pressed to keep up. Being fair, that doesn’t really matter, as the action itself is a relatively cerebral piece of gaming. Far from your standard shoot-’em-up fare, Bionic Commando tasks you with using your bionic arm to jump and swing your way through some impressive cityscapes, taking out the enemies that threaten to impede your progress. To do this, you aim at a radiation-free surface (since radiation is a big threat in the game) or swinging point, and hit your left trigger – which works well. From time to time, the game will refuse to acknowledge that you’re aiming at a perfectly reachable attach point, and it generally happens at the most inconvenient of times. It isn’t a game-killer, but it can ruin the flow somewhat. Titles such as the likes of the solid Spider-Man movie series on the original Xbox did the whole guy-swinging-through-a-city thing a lot better, but Bionic Commando is competent enough.
The environments do have that sandbox feel though, especially when you re-learn your ability to punch pieces of debris into the air and use them as weapons by leaping and kicking them at your opponents. I spent a good ten minutes trying to knock a bus off a crumbling bridge by using volleying various scenery pieces at it, and when it finally fell, a quick glance down at the bus being carried out to sea via the gallons and gallons of beautifully rendered flood water was reward enough. That can be said for a lot of the game too, with the ruined city being presented very well, with lots of nice graphical touches. There is one visual problem though, and that’s with the camera seeming to want to refocus every item on the screen every time you turn too far. A few times – if you manage to climb too high – the covers are drawn back a tad too far and you see a wholly broken and glitched chunk of scenery, rather than the destroyed city that you’d expect. Again not the end of the World, but it is a bit disappointing to see.
Bionic Commando’s weaponry is generally underpowered, with the focus being on using your bionic arm and other abilities to take opponents out, rather than relying on straightforward gunfire. As an example, a pair of early bosses require you to attach to points on their backs and zip yourself in to pull off a powerful kick in order to damage them, and although you’d expect a bullet to that same weak point to cause similar amounts of damage, it doesn’t. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and this sort of thing limits the creativity that the otherwise open game world strives to allow you.
One thing is entirely clear, and that is that Bionic Commando’s latter half is much, much better than the opening gambits. To begin with, you have confused plotlines, clumsy enemy placement and seemingly random encounters with larger enemies but as things move on into the second half of the six or seven-hour campaign, business begins to pick up. Put simply, if I was to review the game in two parts, the first half would get a two, whilst the second part would get double that. Therefore, I should really split the score down the middle. Bionic Commando is better than the sum of its parts though, so it gets a tad more credit than that.
