Thursday, June 8, 2017

Bionic Commando: Rearmed Impressions

Hoo boy, this is a tough one.

I really think having not played the original NES version has completely eliminated any nostalgia I could have for this remake. The control scheme is really hard to wrap my head around: there is no jump. A 2D platformer with no jump. What the hell? The only way to hoist yourself over any waist-high obstacle is to grab above you--at an angle--to pull yourself into a Tarzan swing which you may or may not launch out of depending on how long the game engine thinks you've held down the direction key for.

That is chief among my issues with this game, a fundamentally different control scheme which goes entirely against the rest of the last 30 years of platformer games I have played. Sure, it's striking out into new territory, but Christ is it hard to get comfortable with. So far with just under an hour of playtime I'm already wanting to be done with it.

Functionally, the game is good. Aside from the Tarzan-swing and release, the controls are snappy and responsive. The graphics are good enough, the camera is zoomed out very far in order to allow you to see the areas of the level you need to get to so the character models aren't that detailed. The music is, ah, early 2000s generic techno; advertisement background music, basically. No one's going to go out of their way to buy the soundtrack, if you know what I mean.

This is your typical start of a level: you parachute in and enter whatever location you've landed in,. You can see the level map in the lower right corner, that's a poster in-game rather than an overlay.

This level is pitch black until you've collected the Flares upgrade at one of the friendly camps on the way. I got about halfway through by muddling along in the dark the first time but it wasn't pleasant.

This level is a sewer, I am riding this purple slime ball wherever it is taking me. My only recourse is either to grapple out of it or the slime rolls over a fan like the one to the right.


The first level is rather simple, but it is meant to be an "on the job training" so to speak for the players who don't bother with the Level 0 training mission, or the basic tutorial from the main menu. There's an intelligence hacking minigame that's a rather interesting puzzle. It's a 3D version of the ice block puzzle you see in lots of adventure-type games. In hacking, you have a wireframe cube that contains some number of red cubes, a green cube, and your yellow orb that you have to navigate from the starting point to the green cube. You do this by rotating the entire structure so that you can aim the orb to the next red cube, you can only send your orb moving forward in one direction until it is stopped by something else and if it flies out of the wireframe you fail the puzzle. I found that with the first two hacking puzzles I had to study them to figure out the route I needed to take because there are several dead ends.

Here is one of the hacking puzzles. You have 2-axis control to rotate the cube and the yellow ball will move in the closest approximation to straight forward. The blue cubes are transporters: you enter one and exit the other in parallel going in the same direction. 


There's another minigame you can play at friendly bases which are Challenge Levels. These levels really put you to the test of how well you know the movement system with many of them being Super Meat Boy or I Want to Be the Guy levels of brutal. Going through some of the earlier Challenge Levels did help me get better at maneuvering with the grapple arm, however the dropping straight down off of platforms with no sideways momentum is still rather jarring when I'm trying to move in a downward direction.

This is one of the more difficult Challenge Levels titled The Lost Hope. The floors and ceilings are spikes and you have to grapple the white scaffolding to change direction. So far I've made over 40 attempts and none have succeeded.

There one more game mode that I don't know if it's in the original. This is top-down like Ikari Warriors and happens when your helicopter collides with any of the enemy convoys that are moving around the overworld map at the same time you are.


In revisiting the game again I found a weird issue with the control configuration. I initially began playing it with keyboard bindings because Steam Big Picture mode warned me against using a controller--the game was published on Xbox and PlayStation so of course it supports controllers--but later on I loaded it with my controller anyway. Now coming back to it again I cannot switch back to keyboard input, it's "stuck" on controller bindings.

At the end I'm feeling moderately to very unsatisfied with the game. I'm sure it's faithful to the original, they seem to have worked very hard to have callbacks to it in the feel and behavior. But as I said in my introduction last week I've never played the original so I have no nostalgia for it and the unique gameplay has been uncomfortable.

At $10 on Steam I don't recommend buying it, even bundled with the 3rd-person "modern" sequel for $15. Maybe when it's on sale for $2, but unless you loved the original NES version and would like to play it with graphics like This War of Mine I don't think this is one to seek out.

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