Game Reviews

Given Platinum’s heritage, it’s shocking to discover that Raiden starts Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance without access to a dodge. Our protagonist has no Bayonetta cartwheel, no Viewtiful Joe evade poses, none of God Hand’s lightspeed bobs and weaves. You’ll get one eventually, admittedly, but this is a bold opening statement: Platinum wants you to understand right from the word go that this is not a game of escaping danger, but of facing it head on.

There’s no dedicated block button either, but tilt the left stick towards an opponent preparing to attack and tap Square to make Raiden raise his sword in a defensive stance, fending off the enemy’s strike and staggering you back briefly in block stun. The later you press the button, the shorter the stun; time the press to a handful of frames before the incoming attack connects and you don’t stagger at all, instead countering with a swipe of your own sword, stunning not just your attacker but anyone foolish enough to be nearby – the perfect parry.

Parrying is the beating heart of Rising, more so even than Free Cutting (FC), the directional slice-and-dice mechanic shown off when the game was unveiled in 2009, before Kojima Productions realised action games weren’t its forte and drafted in Platinum. Hold L1 at any time to enter Blade mode, where Square and Triangle perform quick horizontal and vertical swipes, and the right stick enables you to angle a plane to make more precise cuts.

You can use this power on the environment, scything through stanchions to bring down bridges and the enemies atop them, or just for fun, splitting a fairground ride into a thousand pieces, the framerate tanking into single figures under the strain. You’ll cut paths through doors and fences, too, but Blade mode’s principal use is ‘Zandatsu’, Japanese for ‘cut and take’, a fancy name for yanking out an enemy’s spinal column and squashing it in your palm.

You’ll need to whittle down their health first, either through the balletic light-light-heavy combos at your disposal, or if it’s an S rank you’re after, with a perfect parry. Time slows to a crawl and the screen turns blue – your cue to enter Blade mode and line up your strike with the red square that marks your target. A button prompt appears; tap Circle and Raiden yanks out the neon blue vertebrae, the camera pulling round to face him as he crushes the cyborg matter in his palm, his health and FC gauges replenished in an instant.

Rising’s core loop of parry, cut and take is delightful, especially once you start experimenting with it. Apart from a few heavy combo finishers, all your attacks can be cancelled with a parry; you can whale away on a foe with abandon until the very moment an incoming attack connects. Once your opponent is stunned and you’re in Blade mode, you needn’t go straight for the spine. You can slice up the head and lop off the arms before reaching for that sweet regenerative nectar.

If all this sounds distinctly unlike a Metal Gear game so far, don’t be fooled; while this is clearly the work of Platinum Games, Kojima Productions’ presence is felt in more than just the splash screen. There’s that font, of course, the telltale beep when you run low on health, the codec ringtone and the agonised wail from a comrade when you die. There’s the story, a stock-in-trade tale of geopolitical posturing, nanomachines and whacking great tanks condensed to fit a much shorter runtime.

We open with Raiden guarding the prime minister of a war-torn African state, your employer a private military company (PMC) called Maverick Security that seeks to keep the peace. Desperado Enterprises – a rival PMC whose backer, Marshal World, laments the absence of the war economy from its balance sheet and would rather like it back – takes the opposite tack. Fronted by Sundowner, a hulking, bald Texan flanked by three cyborg lieutenants who are all skilled in melee combat, Desperado sets about destabilising Africa by murdering Raiden’s charge, raising a cyborg army with a novel child trafficking/organ harvesting combo and then orchestrating a terrorist attack whose ramifications would outdo even those of 9/11. It’s all firmly in Kojima’s comfort zone.

Yet Platinum frequently finds ways to remind you whose game you’re playing, poking fun at Metal Gear history in a way Kojima wouldn’t. In one scene-setting early fight, you have no choice but to lose, but then Raiden’s arm is sliced off and he mutters, “Shit, not again.” Later, he’ll wonder aloud why he finds himself “surrounded by death, arguing philosophy with terrorists”, a reasonable elevator pitch for the entire Metal Gear series. Some enemies are tucked away in dark corners, hiding in cardboard boxes. Sometimes Platinum’s fun-poking spreads its wings even further: one cutscene’s opening on a stormy sea is too similar to Team Ninja’s splash video to possibly be a coincidence.

In your first run through Rising, you’ll start to get to grips with the system. You’ll learn that the red glint in an enemy cyborg’s eye lets you know an attack is coming, a yellow one means a grab’s on the way, while an orange flash precedes an unblockable attack. You’ll study attack patterns and work on your parry timings. You’ll venture from Africa to the US, taking down Desperado’s leaders and pinching their weaponry: a bo staff for crowd control, an electrically charged sai that stuns enemies and pulls you towards them, and Sundowner’s hulking dual blades. You fight the latter on the roof of the Marshal World HQ, the ascent of which is perhaps the best and most varied section in the game. OK, you’ve taken down the chief antagonist, and it’s only chapter four. But this is a Metal Gear game, and surely Sundowner is merely the frontman for a more nefarious puppeteer behind the scenes?

Indeed, but chapter five is merely chapter three in reverse. Chapter six is a boss fight. Chapter seven is three arenas and two bosses, and then the credits roll. While the game clock doesn’t track cutscenes or retries, it does measure the countless Gears Of War-style slow-walk codec conversations, and by the end of our Normal playthrough it totalled just five and a half hours. After a Hard run in which we skipped all the codec sections, it read nine and a half. When the credits rolled on our Very Hard playthrough, we’d been playing for less than 15 hours. While we certainly didn’t expect a 50-hour game, we were hoping for a little more meat under the exoskeleton than this.

Yes, you can add to your moveset, improve weapons and extend your life and FC bars by spending Battle Points accrued in-game, but we’d completed the Skills section of the Customise menu an hour into our second playthrough. There are only a handful of moves for the weapons you take from fallen bosses, and equipping them binds them to the Triangle button, taking the place of your regular heavy attack and stripping you of a good chunk of your normal moveset. You’re thrown the occasional bone – a new costume, or a stat-boosting wig – but you have no idea when they’re coming. There’s nothing to work towards, nothing like the Bayonetta bracelet that you’d spend an entire playthrough saving up for.

And while Rising’s core combat system is a delight, it’s frequently undermined by the worst thirdperson camera we’ve seen in years. It’s serviceable in more open areas, but it struggles to cope in the cramped confines of a sewer system, a nuclear facility or an office block. It’s even worse on the higher difficulties, when you’re frequently surrounded by three or more of the larger enemies at once, where that beautiful parry system is compromised by a camera that keeps whirling around in a fruitless search for a clear shot of an out-of-sight Raiden. How do you tilt the joystick towards an opponent when you can’t tell where towards is?

It means you’re either going to mistime or misplace your attempted parries, and as such, you’re going to take damage. Perhaps that’s why Zandatsu refills your health, and why healing items are plentiful. They’re used automatically, too – handy in the thick of battle, perhaps, but rather less so against multi-form bosses with checkpoints. You’ll arrive at the boss with a full stock of healing items, fudge your way to its final form, die and have to take it down with a single health bar.

There are even balance issues. On the higher difficulties, the first chapter is comfortably the hardest, where the game bafflingly plays slave to the narrative and strips you of your extended health bar, extra moves and weapons, and doesn’t give you a sniff of Zandatsu until it’s formally introduced in the next chapter.

Platinum is a victim of its own success: its games will forever be compared to Bayonetta, and that’s a standard few can match, although it’s one to which the studio should always aspire. But while Rising’s combat is hugely satisfying to experiment with, and a sight to behold when played well, it’s undermined by technical issues and a singleplayer campaign that peters out just as you think it’s getting going. There’s replay value here, and for Platinum’s most devoted fans it won’t matter if the game is five or 50 hours long, but others will, rightly, feel a little short-changed.