Also nifty and worth mentioning is the variety that Platinum has tried to bring to the gameplay. Along with your bog standard hack and slash mini-arena battles, you will find a lot of varied level design, puzzles and gameplay elements that keep you interested. Watch out for sections of levels breaking away and being given the ability to rotate level geometry to solve puzzles. You also gain the ability about halfway through the game to wall-walk at moonlight and to rewind time. My only gripe is that both features just don’t feel like they were used to their full potential. The time-rewind in particular only comes into play in a couple of sequences. Also thrown into the mix are turret and vehicle sequences that are long enough that may verge on overkill for some people. There are also challenge rooms in most levels that need a bit of snooping to find. Besting these rooms is essential if you want to unlock everything the in-game store has to offer.
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Kiss Me
As deep as the combat is, what you should not be worried about with Bayonetta is accessibility. Note to developers – This is how you make games accessible. Allow casual gamers to have the same experience as the core audience through special difficulty modes, NOT by dumbing down the entire game. Bayonetta practically plays itself on the two easiest difficulty levels, allowing even the most uninitiated of gamers to actually finish the game and see it as it was meant to be played. That said, there are two extra characters and two higher difficulty levels to be unlocked which can (if you wanted to) ramp up the combat to mindnumbing levels, so any masochists reading this can rest easy.
Most levels and boss encounters are also perfectly checkpointed; vitally important for a game where boss fights last through entire levels. The quality of the checkpointing does slip towards the end of the game though, which may cause some controllers to take flight. It isn’t anything too serious, and with combat this good, there is always plenty of wiggle room to improve your technique. Bayonetta is also one of those games that come with interactive cutscenes thrown in at random. You almost never have any forewarning, so it helps that the game always autosaves before they start off. Menus are similarly lag free and full-featured, allowing you to jump between levels and difficulty at will, concoct potions from random enemy-drops, read up on the lore of the world and purchase new items from the store manned by a Resident Evil fan.
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Adding to the experience is some of the classiest production I’ve seen in a game this side of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Mass Effect 2. The intricate neo-gothic architecture is super detailed and the level design, while not being especially interactive in terms of physics, makes up for it by playing with gravity and the previously mentioned level-altering dynamics. Special mentions include the anything but ordinary lava and airplane stages, and skyboxes that will give Mass Effect 2 a run for its money.
Cutscenes are a mix of CG, in-engine and freeze-frame sequences. The latter is a slightly odd choice as a game such as this lives on movement (and the style there of). The music deserves special mention for sheer bravado alone. What we have is a thoroughly eclectic mix of orchestral pieces and blaring bugglegum J-Pop that fits the game like a skin-tight leather glove. Bayonetta’s pitch perfect Nigella-voice lends some much needed credibility to a plot that otherwise leans towards the WTF end of the spectrum. This is where a love for anime and manga might help as the whole thing screams kitsch. The plot and exposition may threaten to take itself seriously before suddenly devolving into slapstick humour and Mithun-da gyrating.
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And that is what I LOVE about it. Behind the cornball quasi-serious witch-versus-sage end-of-the-world plot is a game that lets you ride a motorcycle up a multi-stage rocket escaping earth’s atmosphere. Any complaints about the plot or the ludicrous sexuality or supposed objectification of women on display must be struck down with a pointy stiletto heel and whipped into painful submission. For a title that looks to be embarrassingly upfront with its sexuality, Bayonetta may be one of the best examples of unisex gaming I’ve ever seen. The appeal of watching a beautiful designed and animated heroine kick all kinds of hiney is the same irrespective of sex, and proof enough that developers can stop peddling brain dead minigames as excuses to broaden their audience. Adding to the cred is the fact that the character designer (Shimazaki Mari) is female.
Kill Me
Bayonetta is a serious workout for your arm. It comes highly recommended to anyone wanting to relive the heyday of the Japanese videogame industry and also wants an accessible game with top-notch content for his or her trouble. This is nostalgia at its best; the kind you don’t need those much-maligned rose tinted spectacles to enjoy. Just remember not to blink too much.
(+) Combat with a pedigree
(+) Production values (and then some)
(+) Gameplay variety
(+) Old school length
(-) Questionable checkpointing near the endgame
Title: Bayonetta
Developer/Publisher: Platinum Games/Sega
Genre: Action
Rating: 18
Platforms: Xbox 360 (Rs 2,499), PS3 (Rs 2,499)
Reviewed on: Xbox 360
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