I'd strongly encourage anyone reading this read it fully because there is more than meets the eye here. Combat Mechanics: 1. Combat is both the worst and best thing about B3, the animations are fluid but execution is about as modern as Tekken 1 on PSX. You have a huge move list for each weapon (too huge, and combined is rather overwhelming) with combos to memorise but there is zero ability to invent your own combos with the provided moves, memorising set-in-stone button combinations in order to pull off something is not fun and feels archaic, Tekken 3 25 years ago broke this mould successfully, yes, it was archaic back then, let alone a quarter of a century later. This rigidity will relegate most players to simple punch, kick, or gun moves and your enjoyment will be severely impacted because of it. 2. Dodging in the game is awful, Bayonetta is nowhere near agile enough for the frantic pace of combat. I'm no stranger to games like this being accustomed to other games like DMC and Tekken, to be perfectly frank dodging/blocking mechanics feels like a Tekken 1 alpha experiment. 3. Bayo 3 does an extremely poor job of letting you get a feel for the controls the game throws you into several large bombastic battles in a row starting you off at 1000 miles an hour, if you have never played a DMC or Tekken title you're going to have a very rough start, and even if you have, its still far from ideal. Compounding this hectic, jarring start is the fact that just as you might be getting some basic momentum in battle - in the middle of the fight - the game throws up text boxes completely destroying any rudimentary momentum you might have been getting increasing learning curve difficulty, this happens several times at various points, too. 4. There are a lot of cut scenes during and between combat at the start, during the boss fights, constantly wrestling control away from you in the middle of a fight is DO NOT DO 101 stuff. 5. During loading you can hit a button and practice moves against thin air, this in itself is fine, however during this "training mode" is also where probably one of the most irritating things about the game occurs, you have a combo menu that displays all of Bayonetta's moves for the equipped weapon but while you might be trying to learn one particular move the list will automatically scroll to a button combination the game "thinks" you are trying to do meaning you're always going to be losing sight of the more complex combinations you are practicing. This is also where you will encounter your first bug in the game, you can't manually scroll the combo list even though you are very clearly meant to be able to. 6. Where the **** is hit stun? Controls: Combat controls are not great, holding the ZL button will allow you to summon the currently equipped demon, that's cool, what's not cool is that you HAVE to keep holding the ZL button down while trying to control your demon, why the **** is the ZL button not a toggle? Worst of all is that there are 4 control layouts but NONE of them are customisable so you can't set your own control scheme. Story: This actually is quite solid, what really let's it down though is that while the game offers a recap from Bayo 1 and 2 (I assume for new players) it is essentially LOCKED from new players requiring 1000.. rings?.. to purchase from the "Gates of ****" shop meaning all new players are going to be stumbling around in the dark in terms of story plot, twists, and turns as well. Graphics/Performance: Graphics I don't find anything overly jarring however there is extremely heavy use of dithering which looks horrifically ugly, a lot of textures are also low resolution and muddy. I'm an old fashioned type of gamer and always have prioritised gameplay over graphics but when you have serious gameplay issues AND graphics that aren't all that stellar you've got serious problems. I have no doubt the reason for the heavy use of dithering and low resolution textures in B3 is all in aid of trying to hit 60FPS but the reality is frame rate is a mess in B3, even with Patch 1.2, and the devs absolutely should release another patch locking frame rate to 30FPS and use the performance headroom to improve docked resolution much closer to 1080p rather than what it is, which is 800p or so I'd say. How was it once put by Gavin Archer from Mass Effect 2? "Man's reach exceeding his grasp..." is very apt here. There's a good game in this mess, but Platinum REALLY need to address at least the majority of issues mentioned to get Bayonetta 3 to the level it deserves. On a brighter note visuals and performance on Switch 2 are better so I suppose you can say something is better than nothing, but it's still a long way short of addressing the issues the game does have.
Bestseller
