Bayonetta: A Hands-On Look

That is to say, the action is over the top, the attacks are all cool and impressive, there's the expected slow motion attacking, and everything just flows beautifully. You pull off combo after combo against enemies in what is really a minimum effort, and it all looks very pretty.

The control scheme, surprisingly, was pretty straightforward and simple. Running was easy, you auto-lock on targets, attacks are easy to pull off as I have previously stated. Even the shoulder buttons, one of the banes of my gaming existence, don't come into play in a frustrating way. You need to use them, especially for dodging, but it is all a matter of darting up and tapping the button when the attack is coming, it's not an incredibly frustrating constant use kind of deal.

I'm hoping this isn't just for the demo, but the dialogue was subtitled and the incoming attacks were indicated on-screen. Audio cues weren't a huge deal. However, from what I heard, the audio is certainly nice.

One interesting feature comes up when the game is put into Very Easy or Easy mode, allowing it to be played one handed. All you do is press the punch button and the game automatically moves you into the best places for combat and initiates combos. If you want, you can jump in with other buttons at any moment to make things a bit more interesting. This is an incredibly useful feature for those that want to play action style games but cannot. Especially, since the automatic mode is only enabled in the easy setting, casual or disabled gamers who do not need this kind of setting may not even realize it exists.

Now, this was only a demo, but I would like to take a minute to praise the demo itself. Before leaping into action, you are given a brief tutorial. What button does what action, how to do combos, combat basics, and so on. When you are put in the game, your offered path is linear, with other doors actually blocked off by cones. After going down the appropriate path, you are gently thrown into combat against increasingly challenging enemies, and the entire time the game reminds you of what you should be doing. Next comes a boss fight, and then another. The whole play through, you get a chance to try different moves, different modes, different weapons, and see how everything works in battle. This is refreshing to other demos that place you right in the middle of everything and give you no indication of what you should be doing.

Overall, my brief flirtation with Bayonetta has made me want an Xbox 360 more than I've ever wanted before. It is a fantastic, flowing, beautiful, fun, intuitive game, and in a hypothetical universe where I have a 360, I would be out buying it on its January 5 release date.

Comments (1)

Corey Krull

November 18, 2009

Votes: +0

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I recently saw a video of a woman playing the game in the automatic mode with one hand and using only two buttons. Here is that video, http://www.break.com/game-trai...ailer.html . The accessibility looks to be very promising, it's nice to see.

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