by: Chris Vavra

June 04, 2009

Bionic Commando, for some gamers, ranks among the top NES games released. The idea for the game is simple enough. You are a one-armed soldier with a bionic arm and you can use this arm to grapple on walls and spots that would otherwise be impossible for a normal person to reach. That template works very well in a 2-D setting but when it comes to 3-D the results are mixed, at best, and uninspired, at worst.

The single-player quest for the original Bionic Commando gained some notoriety for its brutal, unrelenting difficulty and the non-linear approach to the quest. Bionic Commando: Rearmed, an online-only title for XBLA and PSN hit the online shelves in 2008 with a very similar approach with tough, hard-hitting gameplay and challenge. Alas, the 3-D iteration does not encourage exploration and is very much a Point A to Point B type of game. You would think that Grin, the developer, would have taken a page from the GTA playbook and made as much of Ascension City, the central setting, as open as possible. Instead, we move along where the radar tells us to go and we listen to the voices on the radio as they guide us along with clichéd tough-guy talk.

The story itself is more than a cliché. If this game weren’t so damn serious it would be great camp. Too bad it isn’t camp because that would have amended for some of the pathetic dialogue and the over-the-top serious voice acting. Our hero, Nathan Spencer (the same protagonist from the 2008 game Bionic Commando: Rearmed) is a real jerk. Sure, he has reason. He’s been betrayed. He’s been put to the firing line only to be saved by his former CO, Super Joe, with the assignment to stop a group of terrorists and retrieve a mysterious device that only the Secretary of Defense and the President know about. So we kill hundreds of goons, a couple dozen robots, and deal with some giant bosses including a gunship and a giant worm. Oh yeah, there’s a plot twist at the end. The less said, the better. Every step of the way, I thought this game was nothing more than a third-rate version of the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid. The story feels like they took pieces of the two games and lumped them together in a haphazard manner. The dialogue is no better. It seems like every last cliché was used, starting with the bitter, grizzled former soldier being dragged back in because his superiors have information about his missing wife (and that plot twist by itself is horrible). The story is nothing but dead weight, just like Nathan’s body when he’s hanging from a bridge by his arm.

The bionic arm and the various skills you learn from said arm form the basis of the game and Grin does a fair job of utilizing the arm throughout the game to make it more than a pretty appendage. Using the arm to move around takes some getting used to, but there aren’t too many instances where you need the arm to get across long chasms or anything like that. Those moments are few and far between. The learning curve for the first hour or so is gentle enough so the gamer should have little trouble adjusting. The camera does a good job of tracking your movements and the lock-on feature, though a bit spotty at times, works better than some might have anticipated. The moves you can learn with the bionic arm are useful—especially some of the later ones—but more often than not you’ll be using your pistol and whatever else you’ve scrounged together. The pistol, by the way, has one of the weakest sounds I’ve ever heard for any kind of game. Not since the days of the Klobb from Goldeneye has a game sounded that weak and pathetic. The rest of the guns (there are six or seven, all told) are decent, but picking up ammo for the guns is scarce and you’ll find yourself using grenades, the pistol, and anything that can be moved by the bionic arm.