METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE Rated: Available on:
Metal Gear makes a refreshing change
Rating:
This isn’t your father’s Metal Gear, but it’s almost as good. In the latest chapter of the Metal Gear franchise, players leave behind the series’ stalwart Solid Snake to take control of a mysterious ninja character named Raiden, who has appeared as a supporting character in other Metal Gear games.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, gives Raiden his first starring role, allowing players to delve into the character’s past and discover the story behind the character, discovering where he got his mysterious powers.
Raiden, as it turns out, is a cyborg, developed to assist an international group of mercenaries who sell their services to the highest bidder.
The game starts out with Raiden acting as a bodyguard for the leader of an African state. While escorting the diplomat, an attack by other cyborgs takes Raiden by surprise and ends in the murder of his charge.
Raiden must find and stop the attackers in order to discover who is behind the attack, what they want and why they have access to technology to make cyborgs.
From there, the game takes off at a sprinter’s pace. Raiden can do amazing things. He can run up walls, freeze time and hack and slash his enemies to bits using a sword that would look right at home in a Star Wars movie.
As opposed to previous games in the Metal Gear franchise, which focused on stealth and sneaking past enemies, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is all about high-intensity action sequences.
Raiden can be used to sneak around, but he’s much better suited to tackling hordes of bad guys head-on with his sword and acrobatic skills.
If there is a knock against the game, it’s that, like many of these high-intensity fighting-type titles, gameplay gets a little repetitive at times.
Running into gangs of cybernetically enhanced terrorists gets tiresome after a while. But, to their credit, developers have minimized the boredom by mixing in epic battles with giant robotic monsters and other foes that help to take away from the feeling that all the player is doing is mashing the same buttons over and over.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance deviates from the tried and trusted model of Metal Gear titles in the past. What players end up with is a refreshing reboot to a franchise that was getting a little stale. Add that to using Raiden as the game’s main character, and gamers end up with a welcome twist that is sure to keep both new players and diehard fans entertained for hours.