I could start this review by reminiscing about the original Bionic Commando game and all the fun I had on it ‘back in t’day’, but unfortunately for me I am of a particular age group who were still playing with sandpits and He Man toys at the time it came out, so I can’t. I could also state that I downloaded and enjoyed the recent Xbox Live upgrade of aforementioned game, but I didn’t so once again I can’t. To be completely honest with you, nothing about Bionic Commando had interested me before, and going into playing the fully fleshed-out 3D sequel nothing was particularly interesting me about that either.

This, on reflection, was a pretty harsh mindset to go into reviewing the game with, although not having to peer through rose-tinted spectacles is always a bonus. Still, while it lasts Bionic Commando does regularly hit the right notes with the player, although on the flipside it is also occasionally teeth-grindingly frustrating and not a little perplexing. Set ten years after the end of the original game and featuring Nathan ‘Surly Bastard’ Spencer as your main character, you find yourself being released from the prison you’ve been sitting in for a decade on the condition that you have to help kick some terrorist arse.

Hence, off you go on a rope-swinging, gun-toting adventure. The first thing to report, and with some relief I may add, is that Bionic Commando does a pretty decent job at making navigating yourself around its various stages fun. After a short gunplay tutorial you are given your bionic arm and can fire out a hook onto pretty much any surface, at which point you can jump to it to either scale on top of it or swing from it. On one side of the coin, developers GRIN should be commended on is level layout, as they’ve packed the game full of great sections where you will find yourself swinging from rooftop to rooftop, across gaping chasms and such, and it’s great fun to do.

What isn’t quite so fun, and what comes as a bit of a blow to the experience, is that under the loose pretence that a nuclear bomb has gone off in the city there are irradiated areas you can’t go into or you will die pretty damn quickly. I say a loose pretence as this kind of irradiation is a most unsubtle way of turning the game into a corridor adventure, with suspicious chunks here and there off the beaten track. I personally wasn’t aware that radiation was too fussed on where it hung out, but guess I was wrong.

The major flaw in this is that the game is never particularly obvious about where this radiation is, other than to sometimes put a purply haze suggesting that a section could be bad news. Thus, quite often you will find yourself swinging from whatever piece of the level you are attached to and making a leap for a platform, only to hurl yourself into a nasty cloud of fallout from which there is little chance of recovering given your momentum. I eventually lost count of the times this happened to me, and being presented with the slightly slow loading screen and having to wait to try again was a pain in the arse, even if the checkpointing is (for the most part) pretty fair.

In between all this, the game sees Spencer travelling around getting from A to B with his stretchy, powerful arm, and the further you go the more skills you unlock for it. As with Metroid and various other games of the ilk, at the start of the game yo have a short tutorial in which you are taught lovely things such as how to kite an object into the air and hurl it toward a group of enemies, but then have to wait until around two-thirds into the game before you actually recall it and can use it in combat. The moves themselves are all pretty decent when used properly; picking things up and throwing them save ammo, and a power you gain late-on allows you to take down robots in one fell swoop, and they’re all pretty easy to remember off the top of your head too which is always a bonus.

The quest itself is split into three main chunks, with the total playtime weighing in at a little over ten hours or so. The story that runs through is interesting enough if a little clichéd, but a major annoyance is that Nathan Spencer is possibly the least likeable character in gaming history. Constantly sulking and throwing out gruff lines left right and centre, you never feel particularly sorry that he ended up in prison for things he didn’t do, and you never really feel sorry that his wife has gone either. Of the other characters, one of the main bad guys also has a really over-the-top German accent and is a classic hammy enemy, so it’s not all bad.

Plus, despite all the deaths from swinging into irradiated areas, and despite the game doing the old trick of making itself more difficult by simply throwing more enemies your way, you do end up wanting to play it through to the end. Swinging around the levels is still pretty damn fun for the majority, and it does a pretty good job at making you feel like a super-powered chap amongst mere mortals with the selection of weaponry and abilities at your disposal. It’s not a triple A title and it will annoy the living heck out of you, but it’s not half bad for a few evenings of fun either. Add in a multiplayer that offers some reasonable deathmatch and capture the flag fun (trust me, you’re going to need to be proficient at using the bionic arm) and you end up with something pretty reasonable.

In a way, I am glad that I have left the game with these feelings. There were plenty of really, really enjoyable moments – a boss battle with a giant mechanical worm, a few sections where you swing through dank caverns etc – that will leave a lasting mark on you, even if the other marks the game leaves are more scars from the bloody annoying radiation funnelling. If you’re into your third-person action titles and have a bit of spare time on your hands, Capcom and GRIN have offered up something that, to me at least, is surprisingly well