Written by: PlayDevil.com Staff

 

 

 

With the Japanese release of "Bayonetta" just around the corner (29^th October) Sega has launched the demo on Japan’s PSN and Live services.

 

Having heard the buzz online about the performance trouble with the PS3 version I decided to check out the Sony demo see if there were any problems that would affect peoples enjoyment of the title.

 

For the record while playing the PS3 version I could see no graphical problems. My understanding is that the game looks ‘muddy’ on the Sony machine, but in isolation I couldn’t see anything wrong with the Sega managed port of the Platinum games title.

 

It looked crisp, and I saw no frame rate issues. While some issues maybe seen in side-by-side comparisons, I doubt in isolations any graphical differences will influence PS3 player’s enjoyment of the game. 

 

If I am honest I’m not overly familiar with Bayonetta's forerunners. The games designer, Hideki Kamiya, earlier titles such as Devil May Cry and its progeny passed me by last generation. I tried them all on various friend’s consoles, and though I always felt badass while playing, I never felt the need to buy one for myself. So perhaps I come to Bayonetta with a slightly less experienced than many others will.

 

In the demo (known as Bayonetta: First Climax) either the ‘Normal’ or ‘Automatic’ modes are selectable. ‘Automatic’ allows players to only use buttons to control the action, negating the use of the analogue stick and allowing people to play one handed (!).

 

Bayonetta is total over the top action. Set in semi-industrial gothic environment with a female lead character that has to disrobe to perform her more powerful attacks. Walking around the world seems to suggest that Bayonetta exists in dimension slightly out of shift with regular people who walk around as ghostly apparitions while you fight around them.

 

The detail is incredible and gives a wonderful sense of the world you are in. In a few of the demo’s more cinematic scenes camera control is removed from the player, and instead tracks the action (and Bayonetta) from fixed perspectives as enemies manipulate the environment she is standing in. It is an affect that to works well from I have played, giving a real sense of motion and making the already frenetic action even more dynamic.

 

Combat is frantic and (for a dabbler in the genre like myself) complex. The face buttons allow you to jump, punch, kick and shoot handguns, while shoulder buttons modify these attacks or switch to a weapon (there is no doubt more subtlety than I could grasp here from the Japanese tutorial).

 

Gratifyingly from the start I felt empowered, able to chain combos and juggle enemies in my initial encounters with relative ease. It doesn’t take long for the demo to start introducing larger enemies, at which point the need to have a good grip of the mechanics becomes evident.

 

It was hard to get a real feel for the combat because of the pacing of the demo. Based around four set pieces on show, and focusing heavily on boss encounters, for the most part I only used gunplay. I relied on the ranged attack simply because it worked, larger characters were too immobile to reach me if I kept my distance which allowed me to attack without fear of retaliation. Unfortunately this didn’t prove much fun. I gleaned most of my enjoyment form the short sections with smaller minions as I moved from one staged-area to the next. Whether this will hold true in the full game is yet to be seen but in the short time I played the gun proved an overly simple and dull solution to most problems thrown at me.

 

In fairness I am more of an appreciator of this kind of combat game than I am a player of them, but Bayonetta has gripped me. It maybe the aesthetic, or the buzz about it but I have my 360 preorder in and will be reviewing it in the next few weeks so check back in early November for PlayDevil's take on the game.

 

With that in mind I can confirm that the Japanese magazine Famitsu has reviewed it, giving the 360 versions a perfect 40/40 and the PS3 release a 38/40, just incase you were wondering which one to preorder.