Metal Gear Rising Revengeance – Xbox 360 Demo Review

Look, I get it. Demo’s are essentially timed game play sessions or a few levels to allow the player to experience. They are not meant to be perfect and have are assumed to have a few bugs, this is all acceptable. But, what happened between E3 and yesterday when the demo for Metal Gear Rising Revengeance was released? I stood in line for 30 minute with shitty cell reception to play this game, because honestly have never played a game from the Metal Gear franchise and I was excited to do so. Now I know that some of you will give me shit for never playing a game, but growing up I never really was aware of the franchise and when I did hear about it, I wasn’t really that interested at the time. On the upside, I did acquire the Metal Gear HD Collection for Christmas. Back to my point, I loved the demo they showed off at E3. I was only allowed to play 15 minutes of it, but it was a great 15 minutes. Maybe the difficulty was turned down, maybe the controls were still being worked on? I don’t know the exact reasons why, but  I kicked ass at the game. I was able to fluidly use the regular attacks as well as the free roaming sword, not to mention that I cut the end boss so badly that I broke the demo.  Yesterday when I played the demo, I was shocked to see what had happened. The controls became really different and was very unforgiving of the player being uncoordinated. Again, this may be how all Metal Gear games are, but if that’s how they are how is it fair the new audience they are trying to attain? Does it really make sense to make a game solely appealing to your already made market? I am very indifferent about the following review, I loved it but I also was very frustrated with it.

The notion of a kick ass cyber ninja is an amazing character to play. You have the speed, attack and look of a badass, if you’re not looking closely. The metal jaw and puffy chest really didn’t do it for me on the cool meter. I also could’ve played the rest of the demo just fine if the shot of Raiden’s heeled shoes weren’t shown, for some reason that really bugged me.  The demo doesn’t have a time limit, but does give you a level to play on a difficulty of your choice and a tutorial. The heads up display show a health meter, a meter that shows how much times you have when you do free slicing and a secondary weapon slot for items they never tell you how to use. Let’s start with the tutorial, or lack thereof. The tutorial sets you in a world that looks like it was urinated on, there are objects and a few stationary enemies scattered around for your to practice your moves on. Don’t look for guidance because they give you the very bare minimum of what you can know when it comes to controls. Free slicing enemies is good to avoid hostage is they are holding one and watermelons stand no chance against you ever. After the enemies have been all cut up the demo ends and your given a full page text screen. I was lazy and didn’t get up from my chair so I just skipped it, I prefer the cut scenes telling me the story. Speaking of cut scenes, this game has quite a few long winded scenes. I’ve heard in the past that Metal Geargames have long cut scenes, filled with dialogue and in depth information. Again, I have never played a previous Metal Gear game, so I don’t know for sure. Going off that, I don’t know how the rest of the games were when it came to dialogue or story. This demo made the game out to be a bad action movie, with jokes that constantly missed and characters that became annoying the second they started speaking. The rest of the demo guides you through a level that has only about 12-15 enemies and a boss fight. A lot of the level is you walking around and jumping on boxes to reach higher ledges. There is one part that shows off a drop attack when standing above, but there was only one enemy there so the chance of doing any kind of string attack was out of the question.

Controls and enemies. The controls would be great if they told you what each button did. I know there is an option that lets you see the controls, but a proper game would have taken care of that in the tutorial. I picked up secondary weapons that I’m sure would have helped and my anger during the demo, but was never told how to use it. I also stumbled up a dash option that I had to combine with other buttons to see how it could help me. There was a picture of two buttons that said “parry” but parrying attacks while walking/running around your enemies was so hard. The left stick is used for movement and the right stick is the camera. When attempting to slice something up the left trigger brings up the slicing option, the left thumb stick turns into the camera and the right thumb stick chooses the angle you slice. That may seem easy to you, but try to run at an enemy and press the trigger to bring up the slice only to have the camera go straight up or down because you’re moving and now slicing no one and taking damage. This aspect of the game killed me and the reason I ask what the fuck happened between E3 and the release of the demo, how hard was it to think of a different set of controller buttons to activate and use this attack. The sole purpose to the watermelons and the destroyable environment was to have the player use the sword as much as possible. I became furious after dying numerous times and decided to stick to the medium and hard attacks that were mapped to the face buttons. We’ll get back to attacks in a moment, let’s talk enemies. There are two types of enemies that you face in the demo, a soldier and a two legged robot that makes cow sounds.  The soldiers are really easy to beat and give life if you use the slice option correctly. The two legged robots were a bitch, because they kick you, taking a big chunk of life and have guns that also irritate you. If you’re lucky you’ll get underneath them and pray your slicing attack works, other than that I suggest you run around them and jump attack them. Now to the biggest piece of shit on the demo, the boss. You fight what looks like a miniature lion from the Voltron cartoon, which has a chainsaw stuck to its tail and does charging attacks that you are suppose to “parry”, but since the controls suck ass you end up dying…A LOT. I must have died nearly 20 times, the “parry” option didn’t work and I kept getting my ass handed to me, I started doubting myself at one point and almost looked on you tube to see if there was a strategy that I was missing, but nope it was just me not “parrying”. The demo technically should have lasted 20-25 minutes, but I recorded over an hour of footage.

I know that I said above that I both loved and hated the game, and for the most part I show much disgust with my experience, this is understandable.  I actually enjoyed the game for the most part, graphically it was beautiful and the environments were well detailed and there was always something to try to slice. The story looks interesting and there is mention of upgrades, so I’m thinking that having better abilities will help the game play be less of a pain in the ass than it was. I’m still debating whether to buy it when it comes out or just borrow it from a friend, I know Rene is a huge fan of the Metal Gear games so he may be getting it. Try the demo, check it out for yourself, the controls may make more sense to you and your experience may be completely different than mine.