Bionic Commando

Capcom's action remake puts a swing in our step.

	Version PS3, (360)	Developer Capcom	Publisher Capcom	Genre Action

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Gradually, like the faint, metallic foretaste of a lingering fart, there will dawn the realisation that Spencer, for all his hollering and flexing, is pretty weak. Self-sustaining health bar aside, the only real points of distinction between him and the common trooper are a scant supply of secondary guns, dropped into the landscape (rarely close to hand) by supply rocket at predetermined intervals, and his elastic prosthetic, which fosters unrivalled manoeuvrability but is a bastard to master.

Where Peter Parker had only to fling out his wrist and auto-web some distant gargoyle to speed balletically over New York, Spencer has to be within a certain distance of (around 50 virtual feet, at best estimate) and looking more or less directly at whatever he wants to grapple. Fulfill both criteria and the grapple point will sport a cheery spinning blue indicator, paling to grey if you're too far away, and blazing red if said grapple point is a man on a collision course with your boot soles.

That indicator will be an object of hatred and loathing at first, stubbornly refusing to turn blue as you plummet, a few metres out of range, past a handhold, or hop frantically upwards towards an outcrop while several riflemen fill your trousers with lead. Not all of the fuss and bother, in fairness, is down to the Viagra-injected difficulty curve: the environment's organic clutter is such that the Arm sometimes struggles to distinguish between protruding level architecture and bits of background scenery, pulling you unexpectedly into tree trunks and cliff-faces. At other times, the line wraps around intervening objects and cuts your swing short, leaving you dangling in somebody's gunsights like a wrathful, khaki pinata.

It doesn't help that the Arm has an intense allergy to the blue radiation clouds which wall in, carpet or hover above each of the levels - fly too high, swing too low or make the innocent mistake of trying to carve your own path over the simmer of ruptured concrete, and it's ragdoll time again. Nor is it especially convenient, given the coastal setting, that Nathan's swimming skills rank some way below those of the common refrigerator. Fall in the drink and you'll have a precious 5-6 seconds to divine a grapple point through the murk and yank yourself to safety.

And yet despite these insta-death arcade throwbacks, the trial and (frequent) error process of getting into the swing of things, and the unimaginative but testing opposition, Bionic Commando rarely feels unfair. Even on the toughest of the three difficulty settings, which makes "Normal" look like a bout of Mario Party with your kid sister, there's always a sense that if you could have just timed that one swing a little better, carrying you into the shadow of a busted suspension bridge, say, rather than over it, you'd still be in one piece. Checkpoints, I'm relieved to report, are pretty regular.

Most of the levels revolve around hacking fixed satellite relays and using them to shut down the chains of floating mines which hinder (and, on deactivation, facilitate) Nathan's progress. Each relay has its attendant mob of eagle-sighted, bulk-produced meatheads who need deactivating first, scattered in the general vicinity. As horribly routine as this recurring feature may sound, the volume of space and structures at your disposal multiplies the ways and means tremendously - but more than that, there's the edge-of-your-seat thrill of improvisation when some best-laid plan goes awry, clamping onto that hitherto unnoticed broken monorail, rocketing to the rear of the enemy position, hoping against hope that you'll be able to uppercut one of them into the ocean before the rest chase you off.

Even at its most shut-in, Bionic Commando is limber enough to foster no end of gritted-teeth, hunched-over, reflex-driven adaptation. In one of the earlier underground levels, grenade-less, secondary-weapon-less and low on pistol rounds, I came face to face with a Berserker mech packing a powerful wrist-mounted pellet gun and a titanium right hook. Loitering on foot would have been suicide, but staying airborne in such close confines was a tricky business, and I burned through three restarts in so many minutes before happening on a tight, winding route around the stalactites, the beast keeping pace beneath.

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