Combat and Carnage

Mercifully it isn’t all bad news for Bionic Commando though and, while the exploration and navigation offered up by the game makes jumping in a bath full of vinegar and razorblades look fun, at least the combat isn’t as offensively difficult. Hell, some might go so far as to say the combat is actually fun.

Interestingly though, the fighting in Bionic Commando isn’t fun because of any particular success on behalf of the development team, but because it offers such a wonderful challenge. The enemies are boring and the weapons that you have access to are introduced awfully thanks to the intelligent decision to start you off unarmed and then drop weapons in separately, but the combat still feels fun regardless.

The most common enemies in the game are the standard grunts, but it’s usually those who present the biggest challenge for Spencer. It’s easy enough to shoot them down with a few pistol shots (and the pistol is accurate enough to double as a sniper rifle if you have the ammo), but it’s much more tempting to tackle them hand-to-hand.


Getting close to the enemies though is a dangerous business as they’re all armed with stun-prods that can kill you in two hits or less. Grabbing them with your arm is equally dangerous too as, if you aren’t fast enough, they’ll send a current up the arm and zap you that way.

However, getting in close to your foes is usually the only option Spencer has because, while ammo isn’t exactly in short-supply for the pistol, the stronger weapons will eat through your reserves pretty quickly. Luckily though, the enemies are usually pretty focused around certain relays and objectives and mostly can’t hop around the levels like you can. Well, the polycrafts and mechs can, but they’re easily trounced with a few rockets or a well-tossed crate. There are lots and lots of crates.

The combination of fairly challenging but restricted basic enemies and your bionic arm actually makes for a surprisingly tense combat experience in the end. The only real way Spencer can survive is to either master the various combat moves and upgrades that get gradually unlocked or to adopt a hit and run approach. Both are effective, but it’s the latter we found the most fun. Diving in to a swarm of enemies, kicking them over the horizon with your lead-lined boots and then zipping under a bridge while your health recovers before returning to the fray feels uniquely like guerilla warfare.


Given how challenging and satisfying the combat in Bionic Commando is, especially compared to the rest of the gameplay, makes the fact that the fighting is so spread out both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it stops the combat from ever becoming too repetitive or tedious (and even zip-kicking snipers into the sea could get old eventually), but on the other hand you’ve got all that rubbish city-swinging in between.

One of the things which really does hurt the combat though is the fairly limited arsenal of weapons that Spencer has access to, especially in the early stages of the game. Literally until the progress meter ticks over to around the 50 per cent mark then you’d better be very happy to use nothing but the pistol and very occasional grenade. The shotgun makes a brief appearance, but quickly goes out of the window in favour of the sniper rifle given that you can only carry one other weapon than the pistol.

Compensating for the utterly uninventive selection of guns (calling a shotgun a ‘Hiker’ doesn’t make it anything but a shotgun with a silly name) is the selection of melee moves that get slowly doled out to Spencer. Again, nothing wholly new or remarkable and getting close to enemies can be dangerous, but it’s not something we can really fault. Jumping from a building top into a group of enemies and smashing them with a shockwave isn’t something ever to be sniffed at.