From the incomprehensible story to addicting combat, “Bayonetta,” available for the Play-Station 3 and Xbox 360, never aspires to be anything more than an adrenaline -packed thrill ride and it does not disappoint.
“Bayonetta” is the story of an amnesiac witch named Bayonetta who must confront a seemingly endless army of angels while also discovering her past. To do this, she is assisted by a bartender who resides at the Gates of Hell and provides her with an array of weapons to aid in her quest. Sound weird to you? It did to me until I killed a part-angel, part-dragon, part-statue, part-chicken beast with a giant bird formed from Bayonetta’s hair and realized that this game is completely insane.
“Bayonetta” is nonsensical in the way only video games are able to get away with, and it embraces this fact taking every element of the story to its illogical extreme. The result is an entertaining, and utterly confusing, mix of campy dialogue, snappy one-liners, bad romances and endless references to other video games.
As you may have expected, the story isn’t the main draw of “Bayonetta,” the gameplay is. The action-oriented play style is filled with depth but never forces the player to become an expert at anything to complete the game.
The control scheme is simple. You shoot, punch, kick, jump and dodge with each action allocated to a button. Dodging is the biggest factor in the game as nearly everything you encounter can be evaded and successfully dodging an attack initiates a “Matrix” inspired mode called “Witch-Time” where time slows for everything on screen except for you. If all of this is too much for players, there are two modes of play, Easy and Very Easy, that allow you to perform everything listed above with one button. For more hardcore players, there are a variety of unlockable difficulties and weapons to keep them coming back to the game, with nearly every one of these unlockables radically changing the game. The combat always feels satisfying and there is rarely ever a dull moment with the game only dragging in a few areas, but they never last long enough to distract from the overall experience. The game is a little short, taking me around ten hours to beat, but the unlockable difficulties make the game worth replaying if you enjoyed the combat the first time through.
From the hyper-sexualized ladies to the stylized angels, everything in the game is drenched in the kind of cool you only see in cheap fantasy movies. The character designs are creative and the cut-scenes are always set up well. The only possible downsides are that everything seems to be as sexualized as possible, be it Bayonetta spinning around a pole to turn a gear or simply losing clothing to perform a powerful attack. Some of the in-game cinematic scenes suffer from an odd style that features spoken dialogue while still pictures move as if they were part of a film strip. The effect isn’t bad, it’s just uninteresting compared to the other in-game scenes of characters using motorcycles as weapons or using missiles as surfboards.
It’s been reported by several gaming publications that the PlayStation 3 version of “Bayonetta” suffers from slow-down issues that do not effect the Xbox 360 version and it does impact the game enough to make it an inferior version.
The game isn’t the most approachable one out there but for anyone with a little patience, a taste for the absurd and a love for over-the-top action, “Bayonetta” is worth a try.