Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance reminds me of the famous Dodgeball philosophy: “Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge,” to paraphrase: “Swing, Slash, Stab, Slice and Swing.” You swing, swing again and then swing some more.
I’ll lay my opinion on here straight; the game is bonkers fun. The storyline is quite dark, with a sick organisation harvesting neglected children’s brains, training and implanting them to cyborgs with the organsation’s 
king-pin going right to the top, with a Senator and Presidential Candidate being at the forefront of the deranged regime.
The immediate impression you get from the game is how fluid it plays and feels. Just from the tutorials alone the 60 frame-per-second combat and movement really shines through. Vaulting over obstacles using Ninja Run is fulfilling and simple giving you a somewhat ‘Assassin’s Creed on speed’ feel of getting around. The whole game is smooth to be honest: loading times are excellent even when the game isn’t installed on the drive and you are immediately thrown into the action after the first cut-scene.
The game looks great too. The graphics are excellent considering the high frame rate with a lack of any noticeable drop in performance (on the Xbox’s version anyway) with decent shadow effects, blooming and an acceptable draw distance. Solid, if you pardon the association, is the best way of describing the aesthetics.
But like any game, MGR has it’s drawbacks, a frustrating amount of drawbacks. There are moments in the game where I have simply had to put my controller down calmly for the livelihood of my television or anything else that could break with a sudden propelled Xbox controller towards it.
The difficulty curve is, shall we say, steady with a hint of brick walls. Some missions are difficult but after a couple possibly failed attempts you can get by them, however there are a few moments where I was literally pulling my hair out trying to even visualise beating certain moments. One boss around the middle of the game, Monsoon, took me a good couple hours to complete because his move-set was so inconsistent it was tough to get any hit on him whatsoever. Sometimes you could hit him, sometimes you couldn’t. Sure, it gave the fight some variation but without getting lucky with healing cells and fortunate parrying, it was a tough time to say the least.
One boss fight required me to almost break the game to complete. After taking a certain amount of health from the enemy, you need to use a finisher move to get him to lose his sword. Doing so makes it almost impossible to get a hit on him without receiving 10x more damage back. So, instead of using the finisher move, I continued to chip away at his health, which decreased at a lower rate for a while, until the point where he was into his next phase of attacks, allowing me to complete the fight and continue with the game in an extremely unorthodox and confusing manner. From what I could tell, without having an endless supply of healing cells that weren’t available, there wasn’t a specific move you could use to defeat the boss in the required fashion.
These defects make the game less than perfect and almost ruin the endless fun the game gives the player. An infamous cop-out move by any game developer is needless repetition. Two bosses are fought twice within the game, which left me a little disappointed as up until that point the game was brilliantly original.
The combat system focuses on combos and parrys with manual slicing being the biggest selling point. Using the right analogue stick, deadly 
blows can be stricken upon your foes, slicing them to pieces however you see fit, or, if you have a certain distaste in scenery, you can chop up trees and barrels until your heart’s content. Parrying can be difficult and there are some strong foes that can’t always be parried but other than running away you can’t really dodge attacks.
There’s been a lot of talk about game longevity these days but I don’t think it matters all too much. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance took me around 8 hours to complete, not including the time it took to replay each mission I struggled on, but I think it’s about right. The game does have some replayability to it for something that doesn’t involve mutliplayer. Collectables, enemy specific objectives, new moves as well as rankings are available to obtain for each chapter on varying difficulties. VR missions are unlockable to come back to once you’ve had enough of the main game, alike to challenges such as killing a certain amount of enemies in a time limit.
Music in the game is something else. Jamie Christopherson was the composer for all the tracks that make it such an immersive experience. Jamie, who has worked on such games as Lost Planet and Stranglehold, wrote and composed the music that accompanies the fast pace action of MGR. Hard rock and strong vocals are used throughout with some of the tracks timed with key moments in boss fights.
Metal Gear Rising is a strange one for me. In many ways I absolutely love it. It’s one of the finer hack’n’slash games of it’s generation with it’s excellent combat and stunning performance even on the Xbox 360 but it’s fatal flaws that seem to be inconsistent at particular parts of the game bring it back a peg or two. Despite that, without a doubt Revengeance is a fine addition to any action fan’s collection with blockbuster boss battles and entertaining combat to amuse all for many hours.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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