Metal Gear Rising: Revengence -- Played maybe 2 hours and am done with it. I WANT to like it, despite it being corny as hell and not a MGS game at all, but I just can't. The main culprit here being the camera.
They've tried pretty hard to make a more refined Ninja Gaiden and it just didn't work. You have two attack buttons, and one of them doubles as the parry button. So, you're the middle of fighting multiple enemies and one's about to attack, you press the attack/parry button and press the thumb stick in the direction of the attacker to parry, or, if your timing is right, counterattack. I can't decide if this is dumb or brilliant. On one hand, having a context sensitive button like that is just retarded because half the time you're in the middle of pressing it anyways (to attack) when you realize you need to get on the defensive, so your timing is completely off. On the other hand, it's kind of brilliant because it prevents you from mashing the attack button, so you have to play a more defensive game. The comparison to Ninja Gaiden comes from this - I remember the Xbox game being very tough and required you to block and counterattack to win, and that's what I think they're going for here, it's just that NG did it much much better years ago. This could potentially work out great and I think if I stuck with it more it would be awesome, because the combat has glimpses of being really fun and I like the idea behind the parry system...but I just can't stand it because of something else going on.
The camera. The camera is shit. Terrible. You're a robot ninja, you're fighting ten dudes, and you're jumping around everywhere. The auto-lock targets whatever enemy is closest and in front. The fucking camera generally tries to face whatever the character is facing, which is a shit concept at all when you're a ninja jumping around trying to fight ten dudes, and even more terrible when it just doesn't work. What's worse is that it seems to override the manual camera controls when shifting. So you find the camera heading away from the action, you can't bring it back until it's done focusing on the brick wall you don't want to be looking at - meanwhile, you're getting murdered. The real problem here is that the parry move I mentioned is camera relative....and the camera is character relative. So you can be moving in to attack, see that you're about to be attacked, push the thumb stick towards the attacker, and then have the camera spaz out so the direction you're pushing in no longer equates to the incoming attack. OR you finish a combo and no longer have the enemy on screen so you miss the tell that they're about to attack. Obviously, in both scenarios you get the shit kicked out of you.
It's kind of frustrating because it could be really fun, and I'm sure if you spent time and worked at it you could get good, work around it, and really get into the flow. It's so close, but just misses it. With Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry I never felt like I was taking hits all the time because the game was flawed, just that I wasn't fast enough or I over extended myself. Here it's another story. I'm sure I COULD get used to it, but why bother? There are too many good games out there to feel like I have to work with a flawed system. Especially when the core of the game is dealing with a terrible character in some super robot ninja war and all of a sudden he has a robot dog sidekick and horribly executed stealth elements shoved in to the package. Oh, and all the worst parts of every Metal Gear game all at once - dancing overpowered robots, whiny characters, dumb jokes, and GOD DAMN IT, WHY IS IT SO BAD?
tl;dr: MGR:Revengence - Terrible camera cheapens combat, strips the good parts out of MGS games, jacks up the bad parts, and is anime as fuck. I'M OUT!
