60 Second Review for "Bayonetta"

By Barffly79

When reviewing a title, comparisons to similar games are inevitable. In Bayonetta’s case, the obvious juxtaposition is Devil May Cry. I only played about five minutes of Dante’s first Playstation adventure, but that was enough exposure for me to figure out that Bayonetta was heavily influenced by the Sony exclusive IP. When you consider that Bayonetta was directed by Hideki Kamiya, the brain behind the original Devil May Cry, this is not a surprise. I tend to relate to things based on their influences. In Bayonetta’s case, we have a mix of Devil May Cry, J-Pop music, a Spice Girls video, and soft-core porn.

To quote William Hurt in A History of Violence, “HOW could you F**K that UP?”

Easily, it would seam. Bayonetta starts out promisingly. The visuals are sharp and the voice acting is well done. At the game’s start, the titular character gets ripped out of a nun’s habit while standing over a gravestone and then proceeds to blast away at villainous angels in a stylized Gun Fu dance. All this happens before the first button is mashed on your controller. This cinematic approach is novel at first, but unfortunately it foreshadows some of the game’s biggest flaws. The cut scenes grow tiresome after a while, and the nonsensical story proves to be a clothesline for one repetitive boss fight after another. The camera is horridly frustrating, and you’ll often find yourself getting backstabbed by an enemy that is impossible to see because of the perspective. On top of the camera, there are parts of the game that are only hard to finish because of cheapness. For example, there is one part where you watch a cut scene and then get nailed by an undodgeable barrage of missiles immediately after the cinematic ends. If 360 controllers weren’t so expensive, I may have smashed mine against a wall at this point. Difficulty is fine, but not when it is artificially inflated by poor design.

There is a lot of action (in spastic spurts), and the combat system is fairly deep. The game even allows you to practice combos during the load screens. But there are so many of them that it would take forever and a day to use them all in a real situation. You’ll probably find a few that work in most situations and use them over. And over. And over.

In short, action and beat-em-up fans might like this title. It did a lot right, but it did enough wrong to make me eventually hate it. By the time I got towards the end, it was more of a dogged slog through the visuals instead of a satisfying conclusion to an action saga.