A couple of days ago, I picked up this game with pretty high expectations.  My last foray into the world of heavily stylised action games was in Devil May Cry 4, which is one of 2 games that I have played through twice.  I was hoping that Bayonetta, directed by the original Devil May Cry director Hideki Kamiya, was going to be just as good or better than Devil May Cry 4. It just so happens that I was in luck.  This truly is an amazing game.

Albeit it a bit short (took me 8 hours on easy), there is plenty of stuff to go back and do. As is typical with this style of game, there is a New Game + mode which gives you a head start on a harder difficulty. In my play-through I missed an awful lot of stuff and got a couple of very dismal scores on some levels, especially the final level.

The gameplay is very similar to that of the Devil May Cry series but I found that unlike all of those games, I actually tried to remember and execute combos instead of rapid button mashing. Sure, button mashing can get you so far but combos just feel so much more rewarding and of course deal far more damage.  The camera positioning is adequate although sometimes you have to press on the right thumbstick to fix the camera several times in a short space of time.

The graphics are quite amazing and for the quality of them, there are very little frame rate glitches or screen tearing and they mainly occur during a boss intro movie.  The overall presentation, the loading screens and the mini-cutscenes are excellent. Just like Bayonetta, there is a lot of red and black. The animations are quite excellent also, especially all the little sexy moves Bayonetta does and they show off the best of the movements until after the credits with an incredibly long dance sequence.

The cutscenes are longer and a bit more in number than other games in this genre and they bring the playtime/cutscene ratio to almost 50/50. Depending on how you view it, this is either a bad or a good thing. For me, a very good thing. Especially as the story requires an awful lot of fleshing out. It’s a pretty excellent story, granted it may have been done several times over.  If cutscenes bother you, you can of course skip most of them, the ones you can’t skip, usually will have a quicktime event.

The music takes a break from the Devil May Cry style and adds a lot of orchestral/choral pieces which are just stellar. Of course, there are the few techno induced tracks but the mainstay of the music and Bayonetta’s theme is a sort of jazzy, upbeat type of music.  The music during the bosses is just brilliant and helps build up the epic feeling of the boss fights.  I uploaded Bayonetta’s theme and you can hear it at the bottom of the post.

Overall, this is an amazing game, I personally prefer it over all the other stuff Hideki Kamiya has done and quite frankly, I want to play through it again and again and again.

9/10

One thing I haven’t touched on because I don’t consider to be part of the review is a bit of a touchy subject. That is, would you consider the character of Bayonetta to be sexist or empowering to women? I’ve seen a few comments around the place stating cases for one or the other.  I personally believe that it sits on the extremely fine line between the two.  But of course, I don’t think that my opinion on this matter counts.

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