Bionic Commando : Rearmed

Bionic Commando : Rearmed: A remake of the 2D side-scroller Bionic Commando, a game that earned notoriety more for its need to be different for the sake of being different than anything particularly memorable or great.

Story : Some kind of Nazi faction is building some kind of ancient weapon, all the while kidnapping the ingeniously named soldier “Super Joe” and you, the player, control the equally well-named “Rad Spencer” on his journey to rescue him. For what its worth, the dialogue is more interesting that you’d expect out of such a simple story, despite Rad’s affection for sodomy.

Meet the latest installment in a growing trend in video games – the game designed to promote another game. Joining the ranks of Fable 2 : Pub Games and the Spore Creature Creator, Bionic Commando : Rearmed exists in part to remind players that Capcom is producing a newer, bigger Bionic Commando game in the near future, and to make players think that this is a franchise with a deep and celebrated history. Whether the latter part is true is another question, as the NES game that inspires it is more celebrated for its grappling arm gimmick than anything else.

I’m not quite too sure if the original game is “celebrated” much to begin with to tell the truth.

To its credit, Bionic Commando : Rearmed acknowledges that it’s a remake of an old NES title, a game that clearly didn’t have too much thought put into it aside from “create a guy with an arm that shoots people.” Between the assortment of self-referential jokes in the writing, the use of sprites from the old game scattered around and a soundtrack that remixes the original MIDI tracks with different techno beats, you can’t say that Rearmed isn’t pretending to be anything more than a loving homage to a game from a long forgotten era.

The game expands on the original’s gameplay ideas by adding more types of enemies, a variety of weapons to use to make, and a small handful of original bosses. These help to make the game a bit more forgiving and interesting than its predecessor. However, the functionality behind Bionic Commando’s single unique gameplay mechanic and center of existence remains intact – that your character has a grappling hook arm that clearly weighs so much that asking him to leap or even climb above standard obstacles like the 2-feet-tall barrel is asking for too much out of him. No, instead you kind of have to “swing through” inanimate objects in a clear case of the player having to accept the game’s bizarre laws of nature.

Pretty much every pro and con about the core gameplay rests on this grappling hook and the unusual learning curve it possesses. Controlling the hook and how you swing presents its own set of rules too – you’d think that pointing the analog stick or d-pad in a direction would either fire the hook in a specified direction or extend or detract the cable on your hook, but the controls lose any sense of logic in favor of staying true to its unorthodox original. By default, Rad attempts to fire in a diagonal direction but move the stick and he’ll fire anywhere but. This problem is amplified by the genuinely bad controls that won’t always pick the right direction that you were originally aiming for, causing you to misfire your hook in the wrong direction and fall to your doom.

It’s not that the whole grappling hook mechanic is a bad one, it’s just that the source of the game’s challenge comes more from this, and more from what would otherwise be primitive platforming scenarios than from anything else. The few moments where you’re navigating giant pits by skillfully aiming your hook at certain ceiling spots thrills the player with the feeling of being Cyborg Spiderman. However, most sequences will involve, say, two platforms appearing close together, with just a small space of distance between them that appears on a weird angle. This otherwise odd threat presents an unlikely challenge that could cost you a few lives as you attempt to hope the 360 controller picks up on the right directions you were aiming at and lets you make the precise shots needed to grapple across such a petty gap.

Oh, and you have a set number of lives to beat a level. I tend to think that this old school idea isn’t as outdated as most people think, being that I like games where practice is rewarded with progression. But the game’s challenge comes not from any particular enemy or even a tricky platforming sequence, but rather from the controls and trying to not only figure out how to get the grappling hook to fire where you want it to fire, but hope that the controller clues in on your intention for the hook. I don’t consider fighting the controls to be a good kind of challenge; so ultimately, Rearmed doesn’t provide what I look for in a game of this genre. There seems to be some kind of resurgence of 2D platformers on the handheld systems and digital distribution services like the Xbox Live Arcade, meaning there’s no shortage of ways to feel nostalgic leaping over bottomless pits and stomping goomba-or-goomba-like creatures (thank you Braid), so Rearmed doesn’t feel as novel as it might have been 2 years ago. Hardcore fans of Bionic Commando may want to pick this up to see their gem revived with new graphics, as well as new challenge scenarios to test their mettle, and it’s certainly better than most downloadable games, but this is a game that leaves me wondering why this franchise needed to be resuscitated.

Pros : Entertaining boss fights.

Cons : You’ll repeat most of them twice over.

3 stars

And if you really want the thrill of swinging around, try hunting down the Game Boy Color installment of Bionic Commando.