June 11, 2012 by Vinnie Leduc
Late last year at the VGAs, a wild trailer illustrated how Platinum Games intends to ditch the stealth aspect, a staple of the Metal Gear series, and instead take the franchise in the direction of its acclaimed Bayonetta. Their new game also has one of the stupidest names for a big-budget game: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Oh, those crazy Asians! As if questionable dialogue and voice acting weren’t enough, they’ve begun to make up words. All your base are belong to us.
We managed to look past the weird-ass title and got to check out a hands-on demo of Revengeance at E3. It consisted of a few training levels, but it was undoubtedly some of the most fun I had that day. As your typical hack-and-slash action game, Revengeance gives you two standard buttons (wide attack and strong attack) that you can spam, but that’s like almost any other game in the genre. If you’re close enough to your target, then Blade mode is the way to go. By using the right thumbstick, you’re able to control cyborgified Raiden’s sword for 360 degrees of precision slicing, all in sweet-as-sweaty-sex slow motion.
Blade mode can be triggered independently, or it can be unleashed at the end of a standard button combo for an airborne finishing series that looks absolutely magnificent. It makes fruit ninjas look like master chefs at Benihana. However, Blade mode takes some time to get used to. After a couple minutes I decided to proceed anyway and resort to spamming the right stick if necessary. But I imagine somebody who took the proper time to master Blade mode could become as extremely effective as a surgical instrument, which will be essential when attacking enemies that are holding hostages.
It felt awesome hacking people up in Blade mode and watching the chunks of various sizes slowly slide or slop off… splat! I don’t think I’d ever get sick of the dicing skulls and seeing circles of brain like deli meat slices spin around in slow motion. You can even do this to inanimate objects, too, if you’re bored. Why else would there be a giant car-sized watermelon in the first training section?
In addition to a hits counter that tallies up your massive Killer Instinct-style combos, there are a kill counter and parts counter on the right side of the screen that let you know exactly how many fools you’ve cut up into exactly how many pieces. The training demo included a battle with a biped robot, then ended with a showdown against… a freaking helicopter! I could play this demo alone for hours. I don’t care what you call your game now, Platinum; just let me play robot samurai already.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is set for release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in early 2013.
