WeView: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Metal Gear Rising might not have been the Metal Gear game we needed or necessarily wanted, but it was damn good fun, something that seems to be common throughout Platinum Games’ library.

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The newest instalment did away with the slow pacing of previous games, instead forming an action-packed hack and slash title which focused on the sword-wielding Raiden after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4. While the story might not have matched up to previous titles, it was solid and worked well.

Well, it wasn’t Solid, not at all; this was a completely different approach to Metal Gear, and one that had only been glimpsed in cutscenes before, with Raiden slicing up gargantuan enemies while jumping around the screen.

I loved the game, if you can’t tell; it was a blast from start to finish with the high-octane gameplay being completely different from anything else in its month of release. For that, it managed a Metacritic average of 80 – a score which seems bang on in my opinion.

We didn’t review the game, but Alex had a look at it slightly before the game’s release, describing it as “exactly the refreshing interlude the series has needed for a while.” He concluded with:

Nobody’s saying Rising is perfect, at least from where I’m standing. It’s a clever attempt to take a set of rules and roles and bend them into something else that works to impressive results, but alongside the genre best (and I’d include the aforementioned Platinum titles in that list) it doesn’t quite match up. It’s powerful, explosive and absolutely stacks of fun, but you can’t help feeling that the developers have tried to tick every box, and not just the ones marked “Property of Konami”. Bullet hell, button challenges, endless streams of enemies, screen filling bosses, punctuated pre-rendered movies, stealthy bits. You get the idea.

I also discussed the game, soon after release, deciding whether it was actually necessary in terms of the Metal Gear story. While I concluded that it wasn’t really necessary, it was still a hell of a lot of fun considering its spin-off nature.

So, yes, Rising was a fantastic game and I really hope they can do a sequel to expand on its foundations and make it even better. I’m aware that not everyone thought that, however, and you might be one of those people.

Whether you agree with my analysis or you don’t, then leave a comment below and we’ll round up your thoughts next Monday in our weekly verdict article. I’m really interested to see your opinions, so to make them as clear as possible put a Buy It, Bargain Bin It, Rent It or Avoid It rating on the end. See you next week!

3 Comments

  1. A fun, frantic game of swords and machines that’s over far too fast. The replay value is very limited, even with the included virtual missions, but it’s worth experiencing nevertheless.

    Rent It

  2. I’ve not played this yet, I don’t really like hack and slash as a genre but I do love the Force Unleashed games and I have a massive Kojima man-crush, so i’d definitely give it a try. Im looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks.

  3. I absoloutely adored this game (Though I am part of that rare breed of gamers that liked Raiden). Cutting stuff was awesome with the cut mechanic being very well implemented but a special mention has to go to the boss battles. They are fantastic overblown affairs with absoloutely brilliant music (The way they make the music change at certain moments works really well) so much so that i bought the soundtrack.

    I’d say buy it as I saw it yesterday between £13 and £20

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