Bayonetta – Review

Bayonetta herself is destined to become an iconic character in the world of games, a femme fatales, school teacher/stripper look that all boys used to fancy at school (beware she’s a witch). Bayonetta is the kind of game you dream of playing, the game that every platform should have, and the kind of game character any player would fantasise when he goes to bed (This game was rated “Mature” by the ESRB for near nudity, extremely suggestive imagery, and loads of graphic violence). From start to finish its intricate and intuitive fighting system is a masterclass.

Bayonetta is a thirdperson action game, developed by Platinum Games, from the mind of Hideki Kamiya – the creator of the Devil May Cry series, Bayonetta is an amnesiac woman from a clan of witches – pretty much the last one remaining – in a gothic, steampunk world, with impossibly long legs, guns attached to her stilettos as well as in each hand, and magic hair, known as a Wicked Weave, who goes on a mission to recover her past – as well as mysterious gem – one half of the “Eyes of the World” (she has the other half), which grants the wielder power to control reality.

The game’s controls are pretty solid – Offensive moves are either punches or kicks which are triggered by nailing sequences of button-presses, beat-em-up-style. But they all share a certain rhythm to their execution which means that, after a few hours, you’ll be instinctively using combinations you didn’t know were there for sure. Which would potentially be frustrating if it wasn’t for the responsiveness of the controls. Fill up her magic-meter and you can launch Torture Attacks, in which Bayonetta conjures up the likes of Iron Maidens and giant racks, boots an enemy into them and plays havoc with them. And she can take advantage of pick-ups, such as long pikes, which she employs for a deadly pole-dance, revolving horizontally while shooting. It’s an exceptionally intricate system to master. Battles explode from the screen, with intense concentration needed to see through the furious spectacle and escape a confrontation unscathed.

Bayonetta will battle fellow witches while scurrying up walls, creatures in a form of angels, although they couldn’t be less angelic, giant sea-dwelling demons while surfing and get into scraps on pieces of masonry fizzing through the cosmos. facing off against bear-like hulks with ripping mechanical claws. The frequent boss-battles are simply wondrous to behold – Bayonetta is one of those rare games that you would be happy to watch someone else play.

With so much going on, it can sometimes stretch the technical limitations of your console, such as when the camera struggles to keep up with the furious pace of the action. There are too many cutscenes, and they’re too lengthy in duration, although a selection are among gaming’s finest. The infrequent QTEs catch you off guard, and aren’t helped by annoying loading times. They tend to amount to little more than niggles, however; a small price to pay for such unbridled exhilaration.

Bayonetta’s exceptional quality as a video game is beyond question, raising the bar of its respective genre to hitherto unseen heights, impressively, pulls off the feat of being completely off-the-wall, yet utterly brilliant to play. It’s literally stripperiffic.

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