Bayonetta

It would be very easy for Bayonetta to make itself an excruciatingly hard game - indeed in spots it comes very close - but although the combat system may be deeper than a single playthrough will lead you to believe, the game is very good at only revealing its complexity to those who want to find it. It seems Hideki Kamiya has learnt his lesson from directing the first Devil May Cry game in this regard, because Bayonetta's difficulty level makes it a very easy game to enjoy.

Much of this ease comes as a result of how well the game teaches you to play it. Every enemy's attack has both a distinct audio and visual cue that manag es to catch your attention exactly when it needs to. Once you've learnt to recognise these cues the game starts to dish out its reward in the form of 'Witch Time', a slow motion mode that will activate whenever you manage to dodge an attack in the nick of time.

It's without a doubt one of the smartest features the game includes, as it prevents you from ever dropping your attention of the action and just going into combo reciting mode as you wail on the hordes of enemies that eagerly await your attention.

Once you're on the offensive there's a huge amount of choice on offer for how to best

dish out Bayonetta's particular brand of pain. Multiple weapons, each with their own distinct combo trees can be combined (with one set on your hands and one on your feet) to access literally dozens of moves, all of which are listed for you to try out at literally every interactive loading screen.


Then when you're ready to explore some of the more complex moves in Bayonetta's arsenal you can complete 'Alfheim Portals', special challenge arenas that will place limitations on your play to force you out of your comfort zone. One portal tasks you with only taking out enemies using their own weapons, another with not touching the floor for a specific amount of time. Playing with these mechanics as opposed to just reading about them in a tutorial is a far better way of learning them, and their optional nature means that when they start to become tear-enducingly difficult you've only got yourself to blame for forcing yourself through them.

There's a huge amount of depth to Bayonetta, but it's never forced down your throat, I just wish the same could be said of the story. Bayonetta is a witch who has woken from a hundred year slumber to discover something, which made her want to walk down a load of linear paths in order to find out something so tedious and dull that it's likely you'll never see the end of the big revealing cutscene.

It's not that the absence of a big involving story is an issue, but the forced presence of this mediocre mess with cutscenes that bookend literally every chapter can really spoil the presentation and flow of the game if you make the mistake of watching too many of them. It could be very easy to blot out the existence of any non-interactive part of this game, were it not for the presence of quick time events.

When these quick time events are used within the context of gameplay, they're actually fairly non-intrusive. When initiating high scoring 'Torture' attacks the game will ask you to mash a particular button to get more points. In other words the event is entirely optional unless you're going for a high score. The problem the game has with QTEs is when it decides to use them in what you were lead to believe were cinematics. From the first time you're told to hit 'X' to stop your character falling to her death you're constantly on edge during every cinematic, never daring to let your guard down least you should have to replay or rewatch the last minute or so of action.

These QTEs only really become annoying when you come to try and complete the game for a second or third time in order to increase your ranking which is given to you at the end of each chapter. It's at this point that the game really opens up, when you start to realise the huge plethora of weapon combinations open to you, and the challenges you can choose to undertake with the 'normal' difficulty under your belt.

This reviewer always hates telling people that there's a wrong and a right way to play a game, but in Bayonetta this comes startlingly close to the truth. Playing the game through once is like freewheeling down a hill. You've discovered the basic premise of riding the bike, and you've had fun whilst doing it, but with a little extra effort you can have an incredibly rewarding experience.

That's really what it comes down to with Bayonetta. The core gameplay is so tuned, so polished, and so vast, that its limits are very hard to come to terms with all at once. It's sublime, ridiculous, and wholly epic on an initial playthrough, but it won't let anyone say that his hasn't got the depth to match it.