Bayonetta: Devil May Cry With A Female Touch
Bayonetta is the newest game from Platinum Games, the studio known for the ultra-violent Wii game Madworld. Hideki Kamiya, the creative mind behind the Devil May Cry franchise, is directing Bayonetta. Both forces have came together to bring us a game that feels familiar to fans of Devil May Cry, but branches off onto its own path.
Bayonetta shares many things in common with Devil May Cry, namely the fast-action gameplay. After going through a short demo that explained the basics of attacking, we were thrown into a short cutscene and then traveled north until we came across a fountain where enemies began to spawn. Running up straight to the enemy and attacking doesn’t work in Bayonetta --- the game rewards you for evading the enemy’s attack at the last moment to activate “Witch Time”, which slows down all enemies around you, allowing you to chain attacks against them for a short period of time.
Lots of detail has been put into Bayonetta’s attacking system. The heroine has a pair of handguns attached to both of her ankles, and can switch between either handguns or a sword in her hands with a simple button press. Both are set to different buttons on the controller, and you can chain them together for combo attacks. The heroine can also jump into their air and perform aerial attacks, depending on the enemy. Specific enemies also drop weapons which are more powerful than the heroine’s basic attacks, but break after a set number of uses.
In the demo, three bosses were present. The first two had obvious “glowing” spots that dealt more damage if you were able to hit it, but that made you wide open for their attacks. Once there were close to death, you could execute special attacks that had us rapidly press a button on the controller to get a more “bloodier” finish and rack up more points, which are used to give medals after clearing specific checkpoints. The final boss was more of a war of attrition, since we were fighting another human instead of a giant monster. It had no weak point, so we had to use all of the heroine’s attacks to defeat her.
As long as Bayonetta has enough variation and isn’t comprised of continual “run through X walkway, beat Y enemies, fight Z boss” gameplay like some other games in the hack-and-slash genre, it should be an easy recommendation to fans of the genre. As far as the demo goes, it’s easy to see why this game has been a contender for the Best of Show awards.
