Xboxist

Bionic Commando Demo Impressions

We've played the new Bionic Commando multiplayer demo, and we were left somewhat nonplussed by the gameplay. Are we missing something?

People are very excited about Capcom's upcoming retro remake, Bionic Commando, and so it is understandable that there was a lot of hype leading up to the release of the official demo on Xbox Live today. We downloaded the 530 MB file and jumped in to a half-dozen matches to see what all the fuss was about. This very small taste of the final game allows players to take on 7 others in a multiplayer deathmatch on the map Vertigo. It is not possible to change any of the map's parameters, and games are limited to 5 minutes.

At first we had a bit of difficulty even connecting to a game. Capcom does not allow players to select from their friends list in this demo, and instead uses instant matchmaking to build a game from strangers. It took us about 3 minutes of idle waiting to join and successfully launch a new game.

Vertigo takes place at night, in a cityscape reminiscent of the urban environment from Crackdown. There are lots of vertical surfaces and overhead lines to latch onto and climb up on. By pressing the left trigger, your commando will launch his bionic swinging arm, allowing him to climb, swing, and rapidly move through the air with help from the left analog stick. We found the movement to be very awkward at first, and while things gradually improved we never felt 100% comfortable with the swinging controls. It will take a long time before players are able to navigate the map like they could in Spiderman 2 on the original Xbox.

It was very easy to find enemy players, because they are lit up in bright neon colors and stand out against the night sky. The Bionic Commando manufacturing company may want to re-think their choice of colors for camouflage, since this makes it very difficult to sneak up and execute a melee kill on anybody. Instead, we found it more effective to go in guns blazing with the shotgun, grenade launcher or machine gun and hope for the best. Most times, our kill count was directly related to the quality of weapon we were able to scavenge before encountering another player. This is never a good sign for a multiplayer title, where you want a well-balanced blend of strategy, skill and equipment to determine the outcome.

Graphics were serviceably but not stellar. Since the demo takes place at nighttime, there wasn't much detail to speak of on the sides of buildings, and the background is blurred out with a heavy depth-of-field effect. On the upside, we didn't encounter any noticeable lag while playing online, except for the annoying wait time before getting into a match.

Bionic Commando has the potential to be good, but we weren't sold on the short demo that we've been given. The publisher should have included a helpful tutorial to show new players the ropes and better explain the swinging mechanic before throwing us into a multiplayer match with a bunch of other n00bs. With the limited options available, it is very difficult to decide whether Multiplayer will ultimately be fun or will grow stale quickly. Based on our less-than-stellar early impressions, however, it may be worth it to wait for some reviews of the final game before spending your hard-earned cash. At the very least, try out the multiplayer demo yourself to see if you can master the tricky swinging controls, and decide whether this adds any additional depth to the run-and-gun gameplay.