Bionic Conclusion

There is a bit more to Bionic Commando other than swinging through city streets and the slightly redemptive, but certainly not groundbreaking feel of the combat...but not much more, admittedly.

The main draw and only draw outside of the singleplayer campaign is the multiplayer side of the game which offers up a load of the usual content and lets players take their grappling into an online arena. There’s the usual selection of deathmatch and team-based game modes here, but honestly nothing that startling.

It’s also worth mentioning that the role of the bionic limb is scaled back somewhat in the multiplayer side of the game, with pretty much its only use being in grabbing up ammo supplies and letting you scale the environment. It’s an unsurprising limit of the technology, but one which is worth mentioning just in case you were getting your hopes up that that the multiplayer might offer some startling innovation. It doesn’t.

What is somewhat surprising though given that we were reviewing the game on the PlayStation 3 though was just how bad the game looks. It’s standard operating procedure here at bit-tech that when a game is being reviewed, other journalists should come and offer their thoughts on how the game looks whenever they’re waiting for a system to reboot. This is what happened this time and, frankly, nobody had a single nice thing to say about the graphics in Bionic Commando.


OK, so the game doesn’t look truly bad a lot of the time and the screenshots handed out by Capcom might hint otherwise, but in use the game is definitely underwhelming and a far cry from what we hope the PlayStation 3 is really capable of. The scene is constantly swimming with a lack of anti-aliasing and some of the texture work, especially when it comes to the buildings that have been coated with the blue radiation clouds, isn’t really up to the standard Capcom has shown itself to be capable of before.

So, now that we near the end of the review it’s probably not all that hard to piece together our final opinion; we didn’t like Bionic Commando, at all. The central feature of a bionic arm is the only thing that sets it apart from the hundreds of other, better games and it isn’t even presented very well. The script and characters are limper and more two-dimensional than a toilet roll that’s been dropped down the loo and the graphics are about as appetising. Simply, there are better games in the genre and, even if there weren’t, we still wouldn’t recommend Bionic Commando as being all that fun to play.

Still, though it pains us to say it, the game isn’t utterly worthless. The game is functional at least and there’s bound to be a bunch of people out there who’ll buy in to it based mainly on the nostalgic appeal of the franchise. Unlike some games we’ve reviewed, Bionic Commando is at least playable, even if it isn’t fun. It doesn’t crash all the time and it will at least give players a good ten hours or so of...tedium.

So, count those as good things if you really want, but bear in mind that no matter how you look at Bionic Commando it’s hard to get away from how obtrusively bad or bland the different elements of the game design are. This is a deeply flawed game and no matter how much we want to like the idea of swinging through a ruined city that’s a conclusion we couldn’t escape from even if we had two bionic arms and a go-go bionic car.

Score Guide