I’ll be the first to admit that when I saw screenshots and heard about Bayonetta I was intrigued but less-than-excited about such an obvious Devil May Cry clone. Being a big fan of the Devil May Cry series I wondered “what could Bayonetta possibly offer that DMC hasn’t time and time again?” and found that the answer is… absolutely nothing. From what has been offered it is apparent that the high-jumping, fast-shooting, minion-pounding action is back in full force with a femme fatale feel.
The tutorial felt like it was there to confuse things as they went as the some of the same buttons are used for different things depending on how fast you press them in succession and if you are holding a weapon or not, but as I had come to find in practice the controls were somewhat easy to get used to. The only problems I had were when going into this free-shoot mode, which requires turning the left stick a turn and pressing and holding a designated button and in doing so would start you off arbitrarily in whatever direction you were facing… which was more times than not the opposite way I needed to look from the spinning of the analogue stick. Not to mention I found the movement while in this shooting mode a little slow which made it easy for enemies to attack and hit me out of the first-person view before I was able to aim at them. The movement and animations are nice and smooth moving, making it all too easy to feel like a total badass with little learning curve (especially for those who have played these type of hack-and-slash games).
The graphics in this game definately aren’t meant to show a technical display of what is possible with today’s hardware but by no means does this say that the visuals aren’t fantastic. The scenery is very well done and the character models are decent but lack any real impressiveness until it comes to their demonic counterparts. The boss encounter was enough to keep me interested in more which is a good thing because the story is really lacking any hook for me, but that may all change where there is actual depth added to the story (hopefully there is). Bayonetta herself is, in true fashion of Hideki Kamiya, a kick-ass protagonist who can take on full armies of minions like they were orphaned kittens. She looks like Sarah Palin, has a nice body that is barely hidden by a skin-tight suit, has 2 guns in her hands as well as a gun barrel in each boot as a heel, is flexible and gets naked in order to summon her greatest finishing move where she summons a giant demon to devour her enemies… whats not to love?
Long story short, I look forward to this game as a time filler and really don’t expect it to completely blow me away in the process.
