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According to my save file, I’m currently 57% of the way though the game. But whether this is a percentile for story completion or "full completion" (as in exploration and secret items) I’m not sure. I’ll assume story/chapters for now. Having just finished the FSA building, was anyone else disappointed that you didn’t get to scale the thing yourself? I’m curious how Nathan actually gets up there, since we rarely get to go "inside" buildings – floors with holes blown through the walls not withstanding – and he’ll seemingly fall to his death because its layered with radiation on the walls. And yet he jumps from the roof and lands safely afterwards… Um, okay.
I like the swinging mechanic. A lot, actually. At first it was awkward holding the trigger button to stay grappled onto something, but now it feels very natural. Congratulations on GRIN for nailing what was probably the most crucial mechanic of the entire game. I also found most of the canyon and subterranean chasm sequences well done because there was enough scale to move freely up and down the walls in most of the areas, letting you experiment and take risks exploring instead of timidly skirting areas lest you invoke the wrath of the load screen.
A couple things bother me, though. One of them is the reliance on enemies you have to circle around and hit in "weak spots". The other is soldiers with one or two hit kill batons – making close combat a particularly iffy proposition. Hopefully the adrenaline meter fixes that. I also found the damage warning (the screen becomes progressively redder) less then clear at times. Sometimes, I spend a half minute dodging tons of enemy fire with my screen bright red – and then other times I die within moments.
The voice acting is pretty awful, and the story seems paper thin, but like other reviewers have said its not the story we’re here for so that gets a pass. I do, however, wish we had a little more control over weapon management and a less unbalanced supply of ammunition – I frequently find myself without any, although I tend to be trigger happy. I understand that you can use the environment to pick and throw things (to my pleasant surprise I found you can do the same to live enemy soldiers), but I’m often too busy trying to not die and see through a red screen to grapple/lift/throw boxes at the goons or giant robots who want to kill me. Along with the save points, the uneven distribution of ammo is a frustrating game design flaw, especially when it seems they want the game to be more a shooter then a brawler.
Despite the game’s flaws and stiffer difficulty level, I am enjoying it, and my deaths are generally because I screwed up and not because the game "cheated" or was poorly designed – its just frustrating to see a game that has the potential to be an excellent experience gets bogged down with a lot of minor (and in some cases not so minor) flaws. More then anything, if GRIN could tweak the save system and open up the world, Bionic Commando might just be more then another summer game with some interesting ideas but semi-mediocre execution.
