<img height=300>http://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/bayonetta.jpg
To adequately describe the overall tone of Bayonetta would take more adjectives than a decently sized introduction paragraph could take, so here's a rough smattering that will only just begin to describe it. Bayonetta is, in varying measures, insane, sexy, challenging, intense and sleek. The overall atmosphere is completely over the top. The combat is both smooth and brutal but satisfying. The story is insane and Bayonetta herself is both gratuitously sexualised and yet tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Essentially Bayonetta is a non-stop assault on your senses. It's a game that never lets up in its frenzied fighting, gargantuan bosses and absurd styling's and you'll love every minute of it.
Bayonetta is a witch who wears glasses, sports a sexy librarian beehive hairdo and wears her demonic hair as a cat-suit when it isn't executing attacks and leaving her mostly naked. Her finisher moves are ?torture attacks' that have something of a BDSM quality to them and she lovingly tongues lollipops in cutscenes for no apparent reason. To say that Bayonetta is sexualised is certainly an understatement, but this blatant, unabashed, hyper sexualised aesthetic that you see in the character and the game is indicative of the experience as a whole ? completely, ridiculously over the top, and the game revels in this. This isn't a game that fucks around with subtlety. You can't ride a piece of scrap metal into a whirlpool to punch a demi-god to death using subtlety now can you?
<img height=300>http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2010/01/bayonetta-review/bayonetta_screenshot_1.jpg
Over-the-top attacks are all the norm for Bayonetta
Bayonetta is the ridiculous tale of the Umbra witches and the Lumen Sages ? two opposed but quintessentially linked groups who watched over darkness and light, and whose eternal opposition kept the world in balance. Waking up five hundred years after the collapse of these two groups, you play as the titular Bayonetta, an Umbran Witch with a case of classic videogame amnesia. Acting on a tip from an informant you travel to the isolated European town of Vigrid to uncover your past by way of a few hundred dead angels. The story, much like all the game, is completely over the top and much of it doesn't make much sense on your first play through. What bits of the story that aren't communicated through expositional cutscenes are done so through stagnant text dumps that you'll find whilst playing through the levels, meaning that Bayonetta isn't exactly the poster child for interactive storytelling. Despite being convoluted at places though, Bayonetta's story can be fairly touching when it isn't simply overwhelming.
Bayonetta's main occupation in the game is to punch avian-like angels in the face and as she cat-walks through Vigrid the delicious dispatch of these enemies becomes the games main focus. The quick, brutal combat is controlled primarily through just two buttons. A surprising number of combos can be strung together simply using the punch and kick commands along with timed pauses, as well as some attacks executed while in the air, meaning that Bayonetta is accessible to newcomers while being simultaneously deep and challenging to players on the harder difficulties. The key ingredient in Bayonetta's high-octane battles is witch-time. Pulling on the right trigger whenever an enemy attack is coming your way will cause Bayonetta to pirouette gracefully out of the way, and if you manage to dodge right at the last moment you'll be rewarded with witch time.
http://www.el33tonline.com/images/cache/9638.jpg
These scenery-twisting, massive encounters are the highlight of the game - and they're frequent.
Witch time causes the world to take on a dark tone and slows down time, allowing you to move effortlessly among the now-stationary enemies. It's here where you can smoothly string together one of the games many intense and visually stunning combos to dispatch your foes with style. Activating witch time is simple and important to survival seeing as health is rare and some enemies are tough to counter without its aid. With it, battles feel incredibly smooth, with Bayonetta executing a couple of deft moves before back flipping gracefully out of harm's way, then unleashing a barrage of hard-hitting attacks before finishing with a devastating and incredibly visceral finisher.
The difficulty of the game scales wonderfully, with many encounters proving challenging enough so that you'll have to repeat them once or twice, but hardly any more and that's on the normal setting which is the highest initially available to you. The game encourages multiple playthroughs with a punishing ranking system. You get ranked at the end of every combat scenario, called verses, and then are awarded a trophy at the end of the chapter depending on how well you performed. As someone who went through the normal difficulty feeling challenged but seldom overwhelmed by the difficulty, I was usually scoring pretty low down on the persistent chapter leaderboards. Clearly Bayonetta is a game where practice makes perfect and through the upgraded difficulties (one which robs you of the useful witch-time) and a large list of new combos and weapons to buy in the in-game store, you'll likely find yourself itching for successive playthroughs.
<img height=300>http://ps3.mediagen.fr/bayonetta-screenshot-8_0900021092.jpg
Torture attacks can be executed with a full magic meter
The combat in the game looks and plays great and this is both to do with the responsiveness of the controls and the visually distinctive enemies. Being a demonic bounty hunter, Bayonetta hunts angels. Yet in this world God's messengers take on a completely unique form, making them, in some respects, more horrific and demonic than many enemies do in most other titles. Glorious colours of gold and pristine white collide with monstrous figures to create the games foes. In addition to the bird-men angels you'll dispatch as per course, the game packs an impressive number of boss fights that get progressively larger, more insane and more exhilarating. Just when you think you've seen the epoch of what could possibly be thrown at you the game one-ups itself again. The games many, many boss battles are all immaculately crafted, multi-stage encounters of gargantuan, head-spinning proportions. While the regular combat scenarios are fun enough, it's these boss battles that are really the highlight, offering challenging combat scenarios as well as an impressive visual spectacle.
The game isn't without its faults of course. Some encounters and enemy classes stick out as being particularly annoying to fight, utilising cheap combos that can wipe out half of your health bar without any chance of escaping, and there's a completely arbitrary arcade shooting mini-game that insists on rearing its head in-between every chapter. The game is always very aware that it stands out thanks to its gratuitous displays of violence and sex appeal and this can hinder it at points. Often times the game will spend altogether far too long in cut-scenes, rendering Bayonetta taking out enemies with an absurd amount of grace and lethalness. Many of these scenes can drag on a little too long and you'll wish that the game would stop playing with itself and let you get back to the interaction. Likewise, there are certain parts of the game which deviates slightly from the regular on-foot angel bashing and while these sequences are initially fun and fresh they almost always stay far past their novelty value should allow. The music is another point of contention in this otherwise fantastic game. While the Japanese ?tinted jazz rearrangements fit the nature of the game to a tee, they get reused far too much, meaning most combat scenarios end up sounding annoyingly similar. Once again, the boss battle orchestrations generally surpass the rudimentary combat with suitably epic piano-laced scores.
<img height=300>http://i.cdn.play.tm/s/23757/g/f/2.jpg
Bayonetta is provocative, almost to the point of parody.
The issue of whether Bayonetta is merely sexually pandering or sexually empowering will be a divisive one among players and critics, but in my experience it's hard not to take the character or the game too seriously when it's so full of references and acts so very self-aware. The character herself is sexually provocative to the point of out-right aggression and the game toes an admittedly very fine line between shameless pandering and self-aware irony. This isn't the transparent pandering of the Dead or Alive games. To say Bayonetta isn't trying to be as sexually and violently gratuitous as it possibly can would be a lie, but that, coupled with its kittenish friskiness, lessens the effect from potentially distasteful to merely playful.
Bottom line: No doubt by now in the review stating just how gloriously weird Bayonetta is will have lost its impact ? a trait that the game definitely doesn't share. A recommendation for the game goes to anyone but those who demand subtlety and restraint in their games, and those who might take umbrage with its intentionally provocative manner. While the cutscenes, the music and certain sections of the game can run thin at times, Bayonetta is stylish, confident and utterly engrossing ? both a joy to play and a spectacle to behold.
To adequately describe the overall tone of Bayonetta would take more adjectives than a decently sized introduction paragraph could take, so here's a rough smattering that will only just begin to describe it. Bayonetta is, in varying measures, insane, sexy, challenging, intense and sleek. The overall atmosphere is completely over the top. The combat is both smooth and brutal but satisfying. The story is insane and Bayonetta herself is both gratuitously sexualised and yet tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Essentially Bayonetta is a non-stop assault on your senses. It's a game that never lets up in its frenzied fighting, gargantuan bosses and absurd styling's and you'll love every minute of it.
Bayonetta is a witch who wears glasses, sports a sexy librarian beehive hairdo and wears her demonic hair as a cat-suit when it isn't executing attacks and leaving her mostly naked. Her finisher moves are ?torture attacks' that have something of a BDSM quality to them and she lovingly tongues lollipops in cutscenes for no apparent reason. To say that Bayonetta is sexualised is certainly an understatement, but this blatant, unabashed, hyper sexualised aesthetic that you see in the character and the game is indicative of the experience as a whole ? completely, ridiculously over the top, and the game revels in this. This isn't a game that fucks around with subtlety. You can't ride a piece of scrap metal into a whirlpool to punch a demi-god to death using subtlety now can you?
<img height=300>http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2010/01/bayonetta-review/bayonetta_screenshot_1.jpg
Over-the-top attacks are all the norm for Bayonetta
Bayonetta is the ridiculous tale of the Umbra witches and the Lumen Sages ? two opposed but quintessentially linked groups who watched over darkness and light, and whose eternal opposition kept the world in balance. Waking up five hundred years after the collapse of these two groups, you play as the titular Bayonetta, an Umbran Witch with a case of classic videogame amnesia. Acting on a tip from an informant you travel to the isolated European town of Vigrid to uncover your past by way of a few hundred dead angels. The story, much like all the game, is completely over the top and much of it doesn't make much sense on your first play through. What bits of the story that aren't communicated through expositional cutscenes are done so through stagnant text dumps that you'll find whilst playing through the levels, meaning that Bayonetta isn't exactly the poster child for interactive storytelling. Despite being convoluted at places though, Bayonetta's story can be fairly touching when it isn't simply overwhelming.
Bayonetta's main occupation in the game is to punch avian-like angels in the face and as she cat-walks through Vigrid the delicious dispatch of these enemies becomes the games main focus. The quick, brutal combat is controlled primarily through just two buttons. A surprising number of combos can be strung together simply using the punch and kick commands along with timed pauses, as well as some attacks executed while in the air, meaning that Bayonetta is accessible to newcomers while being simultaneously deep and challenging to players on the harder difficulties. The key ingredient in Bayonetta's high-octane battles is witch-time. Pulling on the right trigger whenever an enemy attack is coming your way will cause Bayonetta to pirouette gracefully out of the way, and if you manage to dodge right at the last moment you'll be rewarded with witch time.
http://www.el33tonline.com/images/cache/9638.jpg
These scenery-twisting, massive encounters are the highlight of the game - and they're frequent.
Witch time causes the world to take on a dark tone and slows down time, allowing you to move effortlessly among the now-stationary enemies. It's here where you can smoothly string together one of the games many intense and visually stunning combos to dispatch your foes with style. Activating witch time is simple and important to survival seeing as health is rare and some enemies are tough to counter without its aid. With it, battles feel incredibly smooth, with Bayonetta executing a couple of deft moves before back flipping gracefully out of harm's way, then unleashing a barrage of hard-hitting attacks before finishing with a devastating and incredibly visceral finisher.
The difficulty of the game scales wonderfully, with many encounters proving challenging enough so that you'll have to repeat them once or twice, but hardly any more and that's on the normal setting which is the highest initially available to you. The game encourages multiple playthroughs with a punishing ranking system. You get ranked at the end of every combat scenario, called verses, and then are awarded a trophy at the end of the chapter depending on how well you performed. As someone who went through the normal difficulty feeling challenged but seldom overwhelmed by the difficulty, I was usually scoring pretty low down on the persistent chapter leaderboards. Clearly Bayonetta is a game where practice makes perfect and through the upgraded difficulties (one which robs you of the useful witch-time) and a large list of new combos and weapons to buy in the in-game store, you'll likely find yourself itching for successive playthroughs.
<img height=300>http://ps3.mediagen.fr/bayonetta-screenshot-8_0900021092.jpg
Torture attacks can be executed with a full magic meter
The combat in the game looks and plays great and this is both to do with the responsiveness of the controls and the visually distinctive enemies. Being a demonic bounty hunter, Bayonetta hunts angels. Yet in this world God's messengers take on a completely unique form, making them, in some respects, more horrific and demonic than many enemies do in most other titles. Glorious colours of gold and pristine white collide with monstrous figures to create the games foes. In addition to the bird-men angels you'll dispatch as per course, the game packs an impressive number of boss fights that get progressively larger, more insane and more exhilarating. Just when you think you've seen the epoch of what could possibly be thrown at you the game one-ups itself again. The games many, many boss battles are all immaculately crafted, multi-stage encounters of gargantuan, head-spinning proportions. While the regular combat scenarios are fun enough, it's these boss battles that are really the highlight, offering challenging combat scenarios as well as an impressive visual spectacle.
The game isn't without its faults of course. Some encounters and enemy classes stick out as being particularly annoying to fight, utilising cheap combos that can wipe out half of your health bar without any chance of escaping, and there's a completely arbitrary arcade shooting mini-game that insists on rearing its head in-between every chapter. The game is always very aware that it stands out thanks to its gratuitous displays of violence and sex appeal and this can hinder it at points. Often times the game will spend altogether far too long in cut-scenes, rendering Bayonetta taking out enemies with an absurd amount of grace and lethalness. Many of these scenes can drag on a little too long and you'll wish that the game would stop playing with itself and let you get back to the interaction. Likewise, there are certain parts of the game which deviates slightly from the regular on-foot angel bashing and while these sequences are initially fun and fresh they almost always stay far past their novelty value should allow. The music is another point of contention in this otherwise fantastic game. While the Japanese ?tinted jazz rearrangements fit the nature of the game to a tee, they get reused far too much, meaning most combat scenarios end up sounding annoyingly similar. Once again, the boss battle orchestrations generally surpass the rudimentary combat with suitably epic piano-laced scores.
<img height=300>http://i.cdn.play.tm/s/23757/g/f/2.jpg
Bayonetta is provocative, almost to the point of parody.
The issue of whether Bayonetta is merely sexually pandering or sexually empowering will be a divisive one among players and critics, but in my experience it's hard not to take the character or the game too seriously when it's so full of references and acts so very self-aware. The character herself is sexually provocative to the point of out-right aggression and the game toes an admittedly very fine line between shameless pandering and self-aware irony. This isn't the transparent pandering of the Dead or Alive games. To say Bayonetta isn't trying to be as sexually and violently gratuitous as it possibly can would be a lie, but that, coupled with its kittenish friskiness, lessens the effect from potentially distasteful to merely playful.
Bottom line: No doubt by now in the review stating just how gloriously weird Bayonetta is will have lost its impact ? a trait that the game definitely doesn't share. A recommendation for the game goes to anyone but those who demand subtlety and restraint in their games, and those who might take umbrage with its intentionally provocative manner. While the cutscenes, the music and certain sections of the game can run thin at times, Bayonetta is stylish, confident and utterly engrossing ? both a joy to play and a spectacle to behold.
