Bionic Commando is not a ‘sandbox’ style game, such as Crackdown, Infamous or modern Spider-Man games. While the game features some ‘corridor’ sections that feel fairly linear, it also includes sections that open up into huge landscapes with several buildings, and are essentially big swinging playgrounds. But either way, once you’ve killed all the enemies in an area, you’ll soon find yourself swinging to the next navigation point on your radar. There are very specific entry and exit points for each section of the world.
Secondly, the swinging mechanic is very different from recent Spider-Man games, which essentially hand you amazing swinging abilities on a silver platter. In Bionic Commando, you have to work a bit harder for your swinging maneuvers, but the payoff is that the action of skillfully swinging around the environment feels much more rewarding. The swinging mechanic is accomplished with the aid of an auto-aiming reticule that suggests the best possible swinging points as they are made available. Think of it as what your character would be looking at when deciding where he should grapple. When you are close enough to successfully attach to the environment, the reticule changes color from gray—indicating something just outside of your reach—to blue. A red color reticule is used when you can attach to enemies, and a yellow color appears when you can pull an item towards you, or use it to attack an enemy. It’s actually a great system, and it works quite well.
The story in Bionic Commando has you going into a major city, shortly after a particularly devastating terrorist attack. Not only does that terrorist attack leave much of the city in ruins, but it also spreads a good deal of radiation throughout the landscape. Seeing as normal military personnel would have major issues traversing the destroyed city and avoiding the numerous pockets of deadly radiation, the government sees fit to release Nathan Spencer—the Bionic Commando—from his prison sentence, and allow him to handle the situation.
While the radiation is supposed to be a blue haze that prevents you from being able to reach places that aren’t actually programmed into the game, it can sometimes feel a little too restricting. Too often the radiation is pretty much completely invisible, and it’s impossible to see the stuff until it’s already starting to kill you. You do normally have time to get back out, but it certainly can be an annoyance at times. Thankfully, unless you’re ignoring the radar’s navigation points, or looking everywhere for collectibles, it’s not usually too much of a problem.
Aside from using your bionic arm to avoid radiation, you’ll also be doing a fair amount of fighting with it. Rather than confusing new players by giving them access to every ability from the start, you gain skills throughout the game at specific points. Eventually, you’ll find yourself using the arm to throw cars at enemies, rip billboards down onto their heads, and toss them around like rag dolls. The downside to this is that you’ll never be able to play through the early sections of the game with a character that has access to all attacks. While that’s unfortunate, it would also make the early sections in the game ridiculously easy, as your character would be way overpowered. While the main abilities in the game are handled this way, the challenges, achievements and collectibles are managed very differently.
There are a whole bunch of challenges in the game that require you to do stuff like kill three enemies with the shotgun while swinging, or kill four enemies with one grenade, or kill 30 enemies using melee attacks. When you complete these challenges, you get a minor upgrade such as more damage when using the shotgun, or the ability to hold a couple extra grenades, or an armor upgrade. None of these upgrades are needed to complete the game—although they’re certainly recommended—and none of them change the way you play the game. They just modify the game slightly, and make your character a bit more powerful. The majority of the game’s achievements or trophies come from completing these challenges.
In addition to the challenges, there are also over 100 collectibles to be found in Bionic Commando. Some of them are found by looking in less than obvious locations. Others are much easier to spot, because they’re out in the open, but they need to be skillfully swung to. Some are even sadistically placed inside radiation, but all of them are fun to look for and attempt to collect.
Collectibles and challenges aren’t all fun and games, however, as they’re the source of one of my biggest issues with Bionic Commando. The problem with the challenges is that they are almost all a bit on the easy side. After going through the game once, I found that I had collected the vast majority of them. The problem with both collectibles and challenges is that they don’t auto-save. While it’s rarely a big problem with the relatively easy challenges, it’s pretty much unforgivable that one bad swing leading to your death can cost you the collectible that you just spent 20 minutes trying to reach.
Bionic Commando is a darn good game, but there’s just too much keeping it from greatness. The music is well done, but I would have loved to hear more remixes of the original’s music. The graphics are beautiful—and thank goodness, not just 50 shades of gray and brown—but there are sometimes minor screen tearing issues. The plot is ambitious, but felt largely disappointing, thanks to far too many loose ends and poorly explained story elements. And while I didn’t want an open world game, this Bionic Commando feels even more linear than the original, and that was a side-scroller! There’s no way to return to completed areas to just have fun exploring, and that was a big part of the original.
Thanks to what I feel is simply the best swinging mechanic to ever appear in a video game—eat your heart out, Spider-Man—I do still recommend Bionic Commando. The campaign is quite enjoyable while it lasts, and the multiplayer is a blast. The game certainly has its flaws, but it is still very much worth playing, and it’s a whole lot of fun.
A few of these were released in early to mid 2009, Tornado Outbreak was September 2009. Pretty sure Dark Void was early 2010. Prince of Persia was late 2008, think week after Thanksgiving. And somehow I don't think a tennis game with 2009 in the name was released in 2007, just saying. ;-)
