Capcom took what should have been easily a great game and crushed it.
You play as Nathan "Rad" Spencer, the protagonist from the previous Bionic Commando. Who has been locked away for five years, which you will find out as he never stops crying about it through the game. Being a mishap on his last mission put Spencer on Death Row. Which is another thing, everyone in the game, including Spenser is completely disgusting with their attitude with one another through the game. The good guys are all mean to each other and so are the bad guys. I understand Spenser is upset about being in jail, but everyone snaps at each other constantly? I wanted to smack all of them and tell them to "grow the eff up!". The constant bad attitude was just unneeded. In this time in age the government has become quite anti-bionic, taking away anything bionic from anyone that has it. Spencer's release comes because of a terrorist organization known as BioReign and destroyed most of Ascension City. Spencer is sent in with his bionic arm back in tact to see what exactly these guys are after. The story is almost nonexistent at best, it seems to be over shadowed by the action in the game, which tends to take over the drive seat most of the time.
You go on a little jog to recover your bionic arm, but nothing too bad. At which time you go through a tutorial on using your bionic arm. Through this I find you will find quickly that you will either love the swinging and go through this game having a ball, or like I, hate it and walk as much as you can to avoid the disappointment that should have been much more fun swinging from place to place. In some ways it seems to try too hard to be realistic on jumping around and swinging and other times, just the not being able to aim to grab onto what you want to next made it more frustrating then it needed or should have been.
The game offers up a somewhat cool challenge system that will get you achievements/trophies. It will also offer you more challenges, upgrades to you, your weapons and your bionic arm. These can be a lot of fun, however if you finish and challenge and then die before the game saves, you have to redo that challenge. This is a horrible mistake and should have never been put into the game. Just the simple fact that you might beat three or four of these challenges just to die and do them over can be the utmost annoying, let alone beating a hard one or two and have the same thing happen. Once you beat a challenge there is no reason not to have the game auto save right then, or just have it not be taken away if you die.
For a game that one would think was very open to explore, you are on a very linear path on your way through the game, being directed where to go with waypoints. Going too far off the path will most likely get you killed in clouds of radiation, or water. Yes the water in this game is the most annoying of any game that kills you with water. Usually when a game sets you up to die in water, you do just that, die. However in this game you land in water and the heaviness of your bionic arms makes you sink and you have to wait for your life bar to drop and if finally kills you off. I understand they put this in because at some points you can save yourself from the water,most times you can not as you drop right in the middle of nowhere. So after a few times, waiting an extra ten seconds to die can get very annoying.
You swing around time to time dealing with a few bad guys. Sometimes there is none of quite a small amount of time which makes you feel like you are wasting your time. To take on these badies you are armed with a standard basic pistol and that is nothing more then a "pea shooter" at best. It is a very weak gun that fires no faster than you can pull the trigger. Though you can fire shots off at a pretty nice rate if you are skilled enough to do so. The cross hair section for aiming is just huge, and does get smaller when you aim closer, but this really takes away from your peripheral vision. You can pull off some mean head shots though in this view, but nothing great. In fact the gun is quite lame and boring. Actually all the guns in this game are. You get different weapons from time to time like a sniper rifle, shotgun, automatic machine gun. None are all that great and you can not carry them all at once. So you sometimes get a weapon, use the few bullets they give you and that is it, sometimes you get ammo off dead bad guys, and the ammo for be for a gun you are not carrying at the time, which is completely useless. It feels as if the developers spent more time focused on the bionic arm and using it, then on the weapons you use.
You get chances to use your arm in combat situations, grabbing bad guys and jumping at them knocking them down, picking up cars and such throwing it at them. This is kind of fun at times, but for the most part boring after a while of doing so. Which I would say is mostly do to the fact that defeating the standard enemy in the game is quite easy to say the least. You do come across situations of dealing with mech type bad guys, which can be a nice challenge at times, but at the end of the day when you know exactly what to do with them, it seems not much more then maybe a mini boss.
I will say this though, the game looks amazing, the environment really comes to life at times for you as you find yourself just checking it out. Sometimes stuff happens in the background that leaves you in 'awe', like a building falling down. That is where you wish you could just swing around free to go anyplace in the game you would like and just look around. Other then that, the game just falls apart, nothing is that fun and the things that are fun are not fun for long at all.
I am even a little upset I spent money to rent this title, save your money and borrow the game from a friend.