Bayonetta
Producer: Sega
Release Date: January 5, 2010
Platform: Xbox360, PS3
Rating: Mature
Genre: Single Player
The Spell’s Been Cast
Written by Mike Lowther
We’ve seen these before. I’ve yet to find a hack & slash title that doesn’t involve button mashing. Though it’s a genre in itself, combos and fast-paced action with colorful visuals can make hack & slash titles slightly appealing. In Bayonetta, you take control of a witch named Bayonetta in a fictional city of Europe, fighting demons and warrior enemies. Really? Is that what we’re doing? Add Japanese pop music, long hair and film cells, and you have yourself a game.
Slightly above-par graphics and mildly entertaining cinematics have made this a boring experience for me. In the least chauvinistic manner of talk, I find it difficult to let out brute badass-ness when your protagonist is female. I’ve noticed a handful of games toward the end of 2009 prove worthy of spraying blood and plentifully wasting ammo as a woman, but this one isn’t cutting it. Pop music and blood… neat? If the developers at Bungie were overrun by the production company that released the American Idol game, I’d say we’d have a worthy competitor here.
Correspondence to ancient Scandinavian mythology raised my eyebrows a bit. Also, the four guns used in this game carry the same names of those in my mother’s spice rack – Parsley, Rosemary, Sage and Thyme. That’s pretty cool. I never mentioned anything about this game being unoriginal. It’s COMPLETELY original. I’ve never seen anything like it; a hot witch with contemporary-styled glasses can slow down time and rip demons apart. Aside from artistic detail, I haven’t seen anything quite different in the realm of gameplay. You can slow down time and perform massive combo blows after a well executed juke, but you’re only limited to what you can destroy mercifully in a short period of time. You can shoot unlimited ammunition from your array of “spicy” guns and pistol-whip enemies to death with guns for shoes.
Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry) has stepped down from his pole of awesomeness and released Bayonetta. Though I’m all for titles released by SEGA, I don’t approve of this one. Decent animations and a terrible frame rate issue have severely swayed me away from this title. Though the battles can be fun at times, the frame rate disables me from seeing exactly what’s going on, and I’m constantly mistaken for enemies when shit just blows up. Sorry Kamiya, but I’ll be staying away from this one for a long time.