Bionic Commando swings along the fine line between love and hate
Published on: 25th May, 2009
Bionic Commando swings along the fine line between love and hate | Related News
I’ve been playing Capcom’s “Bionic Commando” for six days, and I still can’t decide whether I love it or hate it. I can’t remember ever having played a game that did so many things so right, while getting an equal number of things so very wrong. Despite early rumors to the contrary, the lead character in the new “Bionic Commando” is in fact that title character of the 1988 NES classic, and the story (what little story there is) is a direct sequel. Note that I said “direct” sequel, not necessarily “worthy” sequel.
Shortly after rescuing his mentor, Super Joe, in the previous game, Nathan Spencer (the titular Bionic Commando) was betrayed by his government and sentenced to death for treason. Mistrust and paranoia towards their own bionic operatives led the government to initiate a “bionic purge” where they basically repossessed all existing bionic implants (willingly or unwillingly). As the new game begins, a pro-bionics terrorist group called BioReign has blown up Ascension City, leaving it an abandoned, radioactive ruin. Joe, now running the Tactical Arms and Security Committee (T.A.S.C…love those “BC” acronyms) gets Spencer sprung from Death Row, outfits him with a snazzy new version of his bionic arm, and sends him into the wreckage of Ascension City to deal with bio-terrorists, former bionic allies who may now be bio-terrorists, and a subplot involving Spencer’s ex-wife that gives new meaning to the word extraneous. No, never mind…the old meaning of extraneous fits just fine. That’s your whole story, right there.
What a loveable batch of characters Capcom’s rolled out for us. I miss the days when Spencer could only communicate through onscreen text. I don’t remember him having much personality back in 1988, but I know he wasn’t the raging jackass he’s become in 2009. If this was an action movie, Nathan Spencer would be the obnoxious tough guy with a chip on his shoulder who the audience can’t wait to see get knocked off in the third reel. If the deaths were more interesting, this game would have a whole new replay value in seeing how many different ways you can get him killed. In fact, going down the checklist, there’s not a single likeable character in this entire game. It’s like Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” except nobody in “Bionic Commando” gets killed or otherwise…”inconvenienced” in an outhouse (and there’s your literary reference for the week).
So Spencer sets out into the ruins of Ascension City, and they do look phenomenal. Your first view of the city comes as you exit a hole in the side of a building and look down on the wreckage of a Times Square type area. The first of many legitimately great moments in this game comes when you realize the only way to proceed is to fling yourself off into space and start swinging. New weapons are dropped into your area on a regular basis, and typically require some wall scaling to retrieve them. The hacking feature from the 1988 version is also here, with Spencer using his bionic arm to communicate with enemy transmitters for information, back story, and random chatter.
Visually, the city is stunning, a playground of tilted buildings, flag poles, street lights, billboards, and semi-collapsed…everything. At first glance, it looks like a sandbox dream world, open to explore with your bionic swinging arm and super-boots that absorb the impact of a fall from any height. A few minutes of exploring reveals the sandbox for the narrow corridor it is. A splotchy blue glow marks areas that are radioactive, and straying too far into those regions is unhealthy. A flashing radiation symbol warns you to quickly get Spencer back on the all-too linear path. A few hours of following this rigid path and it will also become clear to you that there’s not going to be tons of variety to the road you’re travelling. There are some underground caverns and other surprises to break up the flow, but eventually those impressively crafted ruins start going in one eye and out the other.
As visually appealing as the game is, there are constant visual quirks that may be either glitches or artistic choices, but are distracting either way. When Spencer turns, the scenery he’s turning towards takes a second to come into focus. When he’s moving fast on the swinging arm, there’s also a blurring, which I assume is supposed to be a speed effect. Another, less forgivable visual distraction is the advertising. Considering how much Xbox 360 games cost, I’d like to think I wasn’t paying for advertising. It’s one thing to include billboards for other Capcom games, but I lost track of the number Pepsi machines that were still somehow up and running in the wreckage of Ascension City. To add insult to injury, you can’t even toss them at enemies with your bionic arm.
Speaking of enemies, I’m going out on a limb and saying there are less than ten different types of opponents in the game. Guards who carry different types of weapons from other guards, but wear the same clothes don’t exactly count as unique enemies, and that’s who you’ll see the most of. Even the larger, giant-robot-style enemies don’t look or act significantly different from one another. The lack of variety might be less noticeable if the enemies were more enjoyable to take down, but the garden variety guards in particular just serve to underline the weakness of the gunplay. Other than the bionic arm, weapons combat seems to have been an after thought in this game. Aiming is virtually non-existent if there’s more than one enemy coming after you. If you strafe back and forth, you’ve got a better shot at taking out the enemy than if you take the time to try and line up a shot. Pistol carrying enemies can hit you from three blocks away, but you can manage to miss the guy right in front of you with a shotgun if your targeting reticle isn’t lined up dead center. For a guy who talks a lot of smack, Spencer’s also not too tough. It seems like one or two bullets is all it takes to put him down, and heaven forbid he get anywhere near water. “That arm of yours will sink like a rock,” is a pearl of wisdom from Joe that I could have used before I tried crossing my first water main break. In short, there’s not a lot of commando in “Bionic Commando.”
The only time the combat really perks up is when you’re using the bionic arm. Here, after several hundred words of complaint, is where we get to what “Bionic Commando” does right. The telescoping arm can be used for a multitude of goodness, from picking up ammo that you’d otherwise have to break cover to retrieve, to ripping monorail cars from their track to drop on enemy soldiers ten stories below. The swinging physics are relatively spot on, and after a short learning curve, I found swinging around the city like Tarzan to be completely instinctive. Free flying through an arc hundreds of feet in the air while frantically looking for the next spot to grab onto is one of the aspects of the game that never seems to get old. When my friend Matt was little, he used to think that you could get home from Boston by swinging from light pole to light pole along the Mass Pike (like the Beast from X-Men, as he describes it). In “Bionic Commando” you’ll find yourself doing just that on a regular basis.
Combat with the arm is a brutal, visceral thrill. The most basic move is to use the arm to grapple onto an enemy, then reel yourself into their face, feet first. It works just fine for enemy troops on the ground, but is even more fun when used on airborne foes. Another move, learned later in the game is to latch onto an object (car, enemy body, billboard) with the arm, flip it into the air and either throw or smash it down on the enemy. As great a move as this is, it unfortunately highlights the arbitrary nature of this game. You can fling a downed enemy thorough the air, but not (at first) a live one who’s shooting at you. You can throw a flaming car but not a telephone booth or a Pepsi machine. The move also leaves you open to attack by the enemy while you’re setting it up. Bionic arm combat is most effective if you can get some quick hits in, retreat to cover, pop out, lather, rinse, repeat. Running into a group of even the weakest soldiers and trying to take them all out with flying kicks is a quick way to find yourself back at the last save point. Thankfully, the automatic save points are reasonably interspersed through the levels, practically inviting you to experiment with different way of taking down the enemy.
When the game focuses on the bionics, it’s thrilling. There’s one set piece early on that sums up everything right about this game. Spencer needs to clear the enemies off the rooftop of a tilted skyscraper, but is woefully outnumbered and outgunned. The strategy I used was to get momentum built up swinging on the flagpoles around the building, fling myself up over the roof, latch onto an enemy for a good head kick, then dive off the edge of the roof and repeat. When the focus is on speed, sneak attacks, and evasion, Capcom inadvertently delivers the best Spider-Man game I’ve ever played.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter comes a moment that epitomizes everything they got wrong with “Bionic Commando.” Spencer arrives at a massive skyscraper, with the object of his quest on the roof. Joe tells him the elevator is probably out and Spencer makes a glib comment to the effect that he doesn’t need the elevator. The game shifts to a cut scene of Spencer running toward the building, and then moves straight to a boss fight on the roof. The setup presents you with this massive playground of a climbing structure, basically tells you to get ready to climb it, then skips the whole thing in order to move on to more terribly executed gun play.
Disappointed expectations are something of a recurring theme here. Like the Star Wars prequels or every season finale of Lost, “Bionic Commando’s” ability to deliver hinges completely on what you expect or want from it. When I’m just playing the bionic side of it and try to forget that Spencer is even carrying any other weapons, I’m as pleased as I am watching “Lost.” I can overlook the forced linearity, the repetitive environments, and the inconsistency of time travel theory (oh wait, that one’s “Lost”). As soon as the game moves into the God-awful gun play, or I have to listen to Spencer’s rancidly bitchy dialogue, it’s like sitting through a non-stop loop of Anakin’s “I hate sand” monologue from “Attack of the Clones.” It’s too easy a cliché to say you’ll either love or hate “Bionic Commando.” The truth is you’ll probably do plenty of both.
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