Review: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is an action game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was developed by Platinum Games.

Raiden slicing up some dude while some other dudes look on.

Raiden, the sometimes-protagonist of past Metal Gear games, is now working for a private military contractor called Maverick, which brings him into conflict with another PMC, Desperado, who are engaging in terrorist actions in an effort to plunge the world into endless warfare. Raiden and the rest of Maverick have to stop Desperado’s individual terrorist activities (blowing up an oil refinery, harvesting children’s brains and putting them in cyborg soldier bodies, etc.), and find out what their ultimate goal is, and who is backing them, and why.

Revengeance is a seven hour long game where Raiden runs through linear levels, cutting up bad guys and robots, and fighting a boss at the end of each level.

Raiden has a weak attack and a strong attack which you button mash to string together combos. Raiden can also parry attacks, but the parry system is flawed. To parry you push the analog stick in the direction the attack is coming from and hit the light attack button. This tends to stun Raiden for a second too long and often pushes the enemy out of range. It also does not block all attacks, and is useless if Raiden is surrounded.

Raiden might also have a counterattack, but I am not sure. Sometimes when I blocked an attack it would stun an opponent and I could hit them, but I could never tell what was causing the stun. It could have been something else for all I know. The tutorial was no help in figuring this out, it mentions something that might have been a counterattack once and keeps going if you messed it up.

What Raiden does not have is a good dodge mechanic, which is really needed for when you are surrounded and dealing with attacks that cannot be blocked.

Raiden has a second bar besides his health bar that represents his fuel cells, which are replenished with items or by hitting enemies. When his cells are full the player can enter Blade Mode, where everything slows down and you can control the direction of Raiden’s sword strikes with the analog stick. The point of Blade Mode, partially, when you hit tough enemies and bosses enough parts of them start to glow blue, at which point you can cut those parts off with Blade Mode, weakening them.

The cool thing to do with Blade Mode though, is performing a Zandatsu. To perform a Zandatsu, go into Blade Mode near a weak enemy, and a little square appears somewhere over them. If you cut them there, Raiden will pull out their fuel cells and completely recharge his fuel and health. If you are fighting multiple weak opponents you can perform a Zandatsu on one guy, charge up, and perform another Zandatsu, stringing the one-hit-kills together.

If you line it up correctly you can Zandatsu several guys at once.

Performing a Zandatsu is difficult at first as you learn to line up your attacks with the square, but when you do learn it you feel so satisfied effortlessly cutting down enemies, especially when you perform several Zandatsus in a row.

The best part of the game is when you fight human opponents. Their attacks can be blocked, they react to getting attacked, and with a full fuel cell bar you can cut them up instantly. Even human opponents with armor are fun to fight, because they still react and be blocked.

Fighting large robots, or Unmanned Gears as they are called here, are much less fun. UGs do not twitch when you hit them and they have a lot more health than human enemies, so destroying them is a repetitive task of whittling down their health. UGs cannot be killed instantly, and a lot of their attacks cannot be parried, which would not be a problem if Raiden had a dodge move.

The story, which is told with these really long cutscenes, swings between entertaining action movie and long, preachy dialogue about humanity’s warmongering tendencies and whether war is good or evil, with occasional moments of levity at some of the more absurd parts of the game. Thank goodness for the action sequences, because the rest of the game is so long and drawn out and no one’s opinions are interesting. Raiden seems like he is trying to be cool but is just trying too hard, which is sometimes funny and other times embarrassing. The story is not that complicated, it is just buried under a ton of talking.

You can have these conversations with the Maverick staff any time you want. The conversations are pointless and can run on a long time, but they do flesh out Maverick a lot, and were probably why I grew to like the cast more than the story itself.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has a lot of basic problems, like no dodge or good counterattack, but the cutting up people mechanic is fun and original and keeps the game from being awful.