The Little Frustrations Aren't Mitigated or Justified By the Whole
The idea of Bionic Commando is that you swing around and have fun, but this game realizes what you really wanna do is crappy combat that is wholly reliant on an auto-lockon system that seems great at locking onto the thing you don't want. This goes great with the fact that you die really easily. The game uses regen health, except you don't have a whole lot of it and it regens really slowly, and you run away really slowly, and you die super easily. Which works out, actually, because the checkpoints are pretty far apart.
A lot of actions are just convoluted. To punch an object forward you have to run up to it, press Y to punch it into the air, jump, then press B to punch it at stuff. To throw objects you have to hold Left Trigger to grapple it, press Y to Kite it, then press B to throw it. It doesn't sound complicated but in practice it's clunky and trying to pull it off while dudes are shooting at you is nearly impossible, especially since you're made of paper. This is the game where you have a cyborg arm that is super strong but the most effective thing to do is get headshots with the starter pistol.
The swinging is semi-functional. Again, it mostly uses an auto-lockon system that fares better than the enemy targeting but isn't perfect. I've had it refuse to lock onto the thing I'm right next to, lock onto the wrong thing, etc. It's largely automated---the grappler will lock onto things that aren't necessarily in your view which, while helpful for making the swinging mechanics more automated, means it's grappling onto things you are specifically not looking at. Using the grapple to climb onto ledges is oddly cumbersome because you can't just lock onto the ledge and zip up. You have to lock on, press A to zip in, then press A again to climb up the ledge. The only reason I could see for having to press A twice is in case you want to zip up to the side of a cliff and just chill there for a while, which seems like a questionable thing to account for. Just Cause 2 manages to have better grapple/swing mechanics than this game, even on a gamepad, because it makes the bullshitty parts automatic but requires precision with the aiming and swinging. Here it's the opposite.
I'm not sure why this game exists. I mean, the idea of bringing back Bionic Commando is fine. Rearmed was just fine! And making a Bionic Commando game in 3D sounds interesting. Swinging all over the place and exploring all the nooks and crannies you can get into would be cool. Unfortunately this game doesn't let you do that. The levels are small, segmented, and rigidly linear. There is one way to go, and not only is the rest blocked off but you get killed from being there. It's all "radioactive" because invisible walls suck but restarting an entire segment because you decided to explore without digression is way cool. In review, the swinging is more automated, less robust, clunkier, and more disorienting than in the 2D games, but you don't get the interesting gameplay benefits of a 3D game in the trade-off.
This game would probably have been fun enough if it had been really easy and you could just power through it. Instead I found the difficulty a notch too high, making it much harder to ignore how the many smaller flaws added up.
