I went and picked up Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance last night (obviously), and after putting in a little bit of time with it I decided I’d do a quick first impressions blog before inevitably doing a full on review of the game.* Obviously I’m not done with the game yet, but I wanted to cover a few things. I also kind of wrote this on a whim because I originally wanted to share my opinions about this game with someone I knew was a fan of hack and slashers & Metal Gear titles, only to be told that I apparently wasn't a reliable source of information for this game - for reasons that were never explained. So I decided to share my opinion with people who actually give a shit about what I have to say.
Time is on my side
One thing that’s being bounced around in a few reviews for this game is that it’s a 5ish hour long game. After my first sit-down with this game, I can confidently say that there’s no way this is only a 5 hour game. I put 4 hours of real-time gameplay into Rising last night and I still feel like I have a good ways to go in the game, and my actual in game clock only said I’d logged about 2 hours of game time so far. The game feels like it's on pace to be about an 8-9 hour title.
I think a lot of reviewers simply looked at the game time clock that they get in the game and used that as their basis for how long this game is. The problem is that the in game clock you get for missions and such doesn’t take into account the time spent with cut-scenes, codec conversations, and apparently doesn’t factor in deaths/continues, so it’s only accumulating raw gameplay time from checkpoint to checkpoint. If Rising is 5 or so hours of pure gameplay then I can be perfectly content with that. Hell, if you skip the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 you can beat that game in even less than five hours.
Storytime
So far Rising’s story isn’t going to win any awards, but I can safely say that the story isn’t bad. It’s got appropriate amounts of Kojima-ish cheese, a little bit of Platinum cheese, and by Metal Gear standards is actually a pretty straight forward story. To be perfectly honest having a straight forward Metal Gear story actually feels rather refreshing, especially considering that Raiden’s last starring role was in the overly intricate Metal Gear Solid 2.
Everything so far still feels like an extension of the Metal Gear universe as well. Nothing has stood out so far that really made me go “this doesn’t belong here”. There’ve been a few moments that made me smile in the same silly ways Devil May Cry 3 or Vanquish did, and in general Rising seems to openly embrace the fact that the Metal Gear universe is pretty preposterous and over the top. No complaints will come from me for that. And so far Rising’s story doesn’t feel as insultingly derivative or poorly structured as DmC’s was.
Time to play the game
I’m enjoying the hell out of the actual gameplay so far. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but there’s a depth and intricacy to this game that I’m very much enjoying so far. I’m also noticing a bunch of things that have been polished up from the demo as well.
A few people have expressed camera control issues; honestly I haven’t really encountered any glaring camera issues so far. I’m wondering if the people who are having slight issues with the game’s camera are using the lock-on mechanic at all. I’ve been using that a majority of the time in combat and perhaps that’s what’s been keeping my camera issues at bay.
I’ve heard a couple people complain about the lack of a dodge at the start of the game and how the dodge is activated in this game. Yeah, it would be nice if the dodge was a tad easier to execute, but honestly I haven’t really had a situation in the game where I’ve needed to use it. The game feels a lot more structured around using your parry instead of relying on a dodge like most other hack and slashers out there. The only time I’ve even remotely considered using the dodge at all was when an enemy grenade was thrown into my vicinity, however using Ninja Run generally seems to be the better option in this scenario since you get out of the way just as fast and also deflect bullets away from you.
I’m currently doing my first run through of the game on normal mode. Normal mode seems a tad on the easy side for me, granted I’m a wily old veteran of these types of games at this point. However, normal difficulty still has moments where things can quickly get out of hand and get rather challenging. I’ve seen the “Game Over” screen a few times already, so the game thus far I guess feels adequately challenging and I look forward to eventually challenging the harder difficulties.
Overall
I’m having a blast with Revengeance thus far and as of right now I’d give it a recommendation. If you really want to play the DmC vs MGR card, my primary input is that thus far I’ve had more fun in MGR than DmC. If anything happens in the later portions of the game that changes my opinion I’ll be sure to point it out come my inevitable full review of the game. But thus far I feel like I spent my $60 bucks well.
*If you’re wondering where my “official” review for DmC is, to be perfectly honest I’ve gotten super hung up on my review of the game’s story. The problem is that DmC’s story has kind of a similar problem that The Dark Knight Rises has, the more you think about the story the more you realize it’s an absolute mess.
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