Hectic and over-the-top though it often is, Revengeance hasn’t turned its back on stealth, either.

Revengeance is clearly cut from the same cloth – and one early dash down the face of a crumbling clock-tower is torn straight from the Bayonetta story book – but it’s a more refined, more forgiving game, which manages to be challenging without the brutally abrupt deaths that earlier title often dealt out. Opponents range from garden-variety cyborgs, just ripe for building up your energy and ranking, to vast Metal Gear mecha, cyborg gorillas, pesky yet oddly cute tripod drones to some incredibly eccentric bosses, including Mistral, a woman with an octopus-like array of plug-in robot arms.īayonetta, released in 2010, showcased Platinum’s ability to craft a technically accomplished and hugely entertaining brawler, packed full of unique battles and unexpected set pieces. What’s more, the range of enemies is broad and imaginative enough to make every encounter feel like a separate mini-game in itself, with each requiring their own tactics. Put all this together, and you have a simple yet ingenious combat system where every element – attack, defence, counter-attack and finishing moves – all flow effortlessly into one another. Actually, the story’s much more meandering and convoluted than this, but like the game as a whole, it’s enough to simply hold on by your fingertips and enjoy the wild ride. While acting as security for the prime minister of a small African country, a group of heavily-armed assassins attack, killing the leader and leaving Raiden critically wounded.Įmerging a few years later with new, augmented limbs and a metal jaw, Raiden heads off to exact revenge on the bad guys who chopped him up – which so happens to include preventing a company called Desperado Enterprises from selling the brains of orphaned children and sparking a new War on Terror. The story centres around Raiden, the silver-haired warrior first introduced in MGS2.

It’s a violent, hectic action game, no doubt about it, but it’s also immediately recognisable as a Metal Gear entry. And with Revengeance taking the series closer to the chaotic combat of Bayonetta than the slow-build stealth thrills of Guns Of The Patriots, you might wonder whether any of the Metal Gear DNA would be left in the mix.įrom exhilarating start to dizzying finish, Revengeance dispels those rumours with a flurry of tempered steel. On paper, the meeting of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear stealth series with Platinum Games, whose previous output has included the gloriously demented Bayonetta, MadWorld and underrated shooter Vanquish, seems like a curious one.

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