Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

PS3/Xbox 360; €54.99; Konami; 18+

Two hours into Metal Gear Rising everything just clicks. From its opening scene the game refuses to hold players’ hands. But the sensory overload of early combat gives way to fluid, instinctive action. This is a game that demands players stay alert and on the offensive.

Rising is a third-person perspective action game. Raiden, the protagonist, is a sword-wielding, robotically-enhanced soldier who engages armed and armoured opponents in hand-to-hand combat. This ‘cyborg-ninja’ bats away bullets with the blade of his swords, dashes and jumps with ease, and single-handedly takes down ‘Gears,’ the towering armoured enemies that gave the series its name.

It’s an unexpected change of pace for a twenty-six-year-old series with its origins in the last years of the cold war. Metal Gear games have always had a strong anti-war message - albeit one buried under the excesses of Japanese anime. Stories about rogue states and nuclear proliferation complemented gameplay emphasising stealth over combat.

Violence is your only option here. Using two buttons, light and heavy blows are strung together into elaborate attacks. Wear an enemy down and you can trigger ‘blade mode’ with a tap of the L1 button. This slows time to enable precision attacks that cleave off armour, cut the weapons from larger mechanical enemies and even remove limbs.

Metal Gear Rising is all about empowering the player. Raiden’s every action is designed to awe. But there’s a balance of risk against reward. ‘Blade mode’ drains power from an on-screen meter, while a perfectly aimed attack can cut an opponent in two. Expose the power-source inside and players can fully replenish their energy.

This gameplay hook doesn’t just create a gratifyingly fluid combat system by allowing Raiden to move quickly from one enemy to the next. It also tries to justify the graphic violence. Every opponent can be sliced at will to expose their electronic innards. Even the ‘human’ enemies are presented as cyborgs to be dispatched without guilt and without undermining the series’ pacifist history.

To temper Raiden’s seemingly limitless power, the developers have made him vulnerable to attacks. There’s no simple ‘block’ button here. Enemies chip away large chunks of health with every hit.  

Each incoming attack needs to be parried manually by pushing the left thumbstick in the direction of the blow in time with the light-attack button. It takes some getting used to but the moments when a sequence of carefully timed parries give way to a well-executed counter-attack are the game’s high points.

This graceful back-and-forth is disrupted by the camera design. It sits low and close to the action. When dealing with an enemy ahead, it’s impossible to see other opponents circle around behind. Attacks from outside the player’s field of view are common, and break up the flow of battle.

And what about those first two hours? Players are hampered by the lack of a thorough tutorial to introduce the game’s complexities. The parry manoeuvre is mentioned early, but no effort is made to ensure players know how to use it before throwing them into danger. Rising has a few rough edges.

This is the first major Metal Gear release not directed by series-creator Hideo Kojima. Development was handed over to action-game experts, Platinum Games. Kenji Saito, lead programmer on Platinum’s critically acclaimed 2009 brawler, Bayonetta, takes over as director.

This is still a Kojima-inspired game, but Platinum have made their mark. Unfortunately they replaced the traditional Harry Gregson-Williams score with their trademark blend of terrible J-pop and hard rock. On the plus-side, Kojima’s background in film tended to weigh his games down with lengthy cut-scenes. Here story punctuates gameplay rather than dissects it. The writing is sharper and more down to earth, even if the voice-acting falls flat at times.

Raiden has always been a minor character in the Metal Gear series. Even though he had a leading role in 2000’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, fans never took to him. His reinvention as a powerful cyborg-ninja at the hands of Platinum Games was a chance at redemption. And they have delivered.

Rising is a Metal Gear game no less ridiculous than its predecessors but one that has a focus, a pace and a punch like no other title in the series.

Game reviewed on PlayStation 3.