Last week the HD version of Zone of the Enders arrived, and it came with a demo disk for Konami’s upcoming Metal Gear side story, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. We had our hands on this game before, but the new demo gives a much more in-depth look at this tale of a cyborg ninja and his quest for revenge… ance!
“Revengeance” isn’t a word, but I’ll let Konami off the hook for making up silly titles because the game is coming together so well. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance lets players control Raiden who is back with an all-new cyborg body. The demo goes into more detail about the story and explains that Raiden now works for a private military contractor, and the plot will involve him trying to stop a rival “PMC” from taking over a small country.
Text at the beginning of the demo tells us that Raiden got his sexy ass kicked in a fight, and lost a few body parts in the battle. The playable mission involves Raiden learning to use his new cybernetic augmentations.
The style of play is much more action-packed than previous Metal Gear games. While there is some stealth, Revengeance is more like the Ninja Gaiden series. Raiden wields a sword that can cut through just about anything, and he sprints around slashing enemies into pieces.
He can pick up secondary weapons like grenades and rocket launchers, but most of the combat seen in the demos have been based around the sword, and a “Blade Mode” feature.
Blade Mode is like Bullet Time for melee combat. Players can hit the shoulder button to slow down time, and use the analog stick to aim Raiden’s sword with precision at enemy weak spots.
If players successfully hit a weak spot, they’ll be able to execute a finishing move where Raiden harvests the cybernetic fluids of his foes to replenish his health and energy.
That’s right, Raiden is a cyborg AND a vampire.
A Vampyborg.
The writers have a lot of fun with this concept; Raiden’s support team makes Dracula noises at him (“Bleahrgh”), and one character even offers him upgrades in exchange for harvesting cyborg body parts from enemies.
The sword-fighting can be used to chop up almost anything in the environment, and the level designers use this to give players some tactical choices. Destructible columns let Raiden cut the ground out from under patrolling enemies, and Raiden can blow up vehicles that some foes are standing on.
The demo also shows off Raiden’s AR vision, a form of X-ray vision that highlights patrolling enemies and objects of interests. This sort of thing has become quite common in recent years. It makes things relatively easy when compared to the radar from previous Metal Gear games, but Raiden isn’t as sneaky as he was in the other games so it balances out. In general, the stealth aspects are just running up behind a guard when his back is turned, and hitting the instant kill button.
As with the other Metal Gear games, people talk a lot in this one too. The dialog is well-written with a balance of humor and serious philosophy. Based on the boss encounter with a robot wolf, the game will explore notions of free will, self-awareness and the morality of creating sentient machines. Oh, and it has cool cyborg vampires too.
This demo contains a good hour of play, and is worth running through a couple of times. Players shouldn’t buy the Zone of the Enders HD Collection just for this, but it definitely adds some added value and play time to that package for people who are on the fence about it. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance comes out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on February 19th.
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