Bayonetta

I know the game came out in 2010, but I just played it this year due to finding it in a bargain bin for 5 bucks.

Bayonetta is a really strange game. I'm not talking about the ludicrous main character or her insane beehive hairdo. The entire game is concentrated insanity. It's almost as if the creator and the artists were on LSD when they were making it.

But on the bright side, it plays great.

Bayonetta is a story about a Witch, some Sages, Angles, Hair-suits, and gun-shoes. That's honestly about all I can say for sure that I understood about the main story. The game certainly doesn't go out of its way to explain what is happening or why it is happening. All you need to know is: Bayonetta is a Witch, she lost her memories and she kills the hell out of angles. Honestly that's all you really need to know, because the rest of the story (or at least the portions I understood) just isn't important. You are looking at a game that revels in style and action exclusively, and to its credit, it is oozing with style and action.

Bayonetta is an action game in the purest sense of the word - you control bayonetta from a third-person perspective and execute a very diverse array of combos and moves to dodge, hit and execute swarms of enemies that attack you with surprising ferocity. Bayonetta is probably the very antithesis of a "casual" game - while it does allow room for error, you have to really pay attention and have quick reaction times to play the game properly. If you've played Devil May Cry, it's sort of like that in terms of its gameplay - ludicrously fast-paced and challenging with spectacular spectacles of hyper-violence.

Gameplay is very well done: the controls work well, the game is responsive and it has a fantastic sense of flow - you are constantly hitting enemies, dodging enemies, filling up metres, executing "torture" attacks and mashing buttons to build up "gigaton" combos. But although you can mash buttons, Bayonetta has a surprisingly deep fighting system that rewards players who actually remember combos and dodge at exactly the last moment to trigger "witch time", which temporarily slows down enemies. It's simply very fun to play.

As for its art style, much as been made of the "sexy" main character. To be honest, Bayonetta, the game, isn't all that sexy. You rarely find yourself looking at Bayonetta herself, because the environments are so colourful and the fighting is so intense that the enemies demand your complete attention. And as the game progresses, Bayonetta's behaviour reaches such ludicrous extremes that the player is just left befuddled and amused, but hardly "turned on". Her "sexiness" just becomes a character trait, along with her crazy hair and giraffe sized legs. It's so over the top that it neutralizes any potential visual gratification. You stare at Bayonetta in disbelief and shock, not because of her physical attractiveness.

The level design and the enemy design is also fantastic, and far more worth staring at than Bayonetta herself. Some of the strangest enemies I've ever seen are on offer here. Although she fights angels, these are not the angels you see on christmas cards or painted on medieval paintings. These are bestial, otherworldly angels, made up of tentacles, upside-down giant baby-heads, dragon wings and every manner of twisted life form thrown together into a big blender. Enemies become so twisted, so huge, so ludicrous that playing through the game just to see the next boss design is a serious incentive.

I can't give Bayonetta 5 stars though. The game can be ludicrously punishing at times, sometimes expecting you to complete an arbitrary objective (sometimes during a fight no less) without telling you what it is or how to do it. The story is mostly garbage and its 4th wall breaking "post-modern" winks at the audience get a little tiresome. Some of the other human characters that accompany Bayonetta on her mad angel-killing spree are downright boring or annoying.

But on the whole, Bayonetta is a blast to play. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to inject LSD into your eyeballs while designing a game, buddy, this is about as close to that experience as you can get. It's insane. Insane.