Jumping. Don't you just love to jump? It's so freeing. It's like flying. And video game jumps are often ridiculous and gravity-defying, which makes them all the more useful. But not all games have a jump, of course. Platformers do, though, don't they? I mean, you wouldn't want them to not have a jump, would you?
Apparently, some folks do, and those folks are fans of Bionic Commando Rearmed, a remake of an NES title from 1988, and a rather faithful one at that, based on a quick glance at some screenshots.
How does not jumping fly in 2008? We'll be doing a lot of climbing instead, right?
Frustrations
Remakes come in all kinds of forms, and Bionic Commando Rearmed has chosen a peculiar form indeed. It's an ugly one, personally, and I'm finding it hard to imagine what it would have been like in 2008.
In some respects, it looks cheap. In others, it looks like an HD version of an NES game, bringing over the colour palette, introducing some depth in the form of 3D models running along 2D planes, and giving new life into a twenty-year-old game.
You are Nathan Spencer, and you are a bionic commando, your entire left arm replaced with an arm shaped grappling hook, and this is how you'll be navigating the stages, not by jumping, but by swinging.
It's is a pain in the arse to use this grappling hook. I'm on the PC so it's mapped to the B button and can shoot out directly above or beside you, or at angles in between. Hook to something above you and press B again, and you'll dangle from an overhead ledge or a beam, and when you're dangling, you can move up or down your arm, I guess, climbing onto ledges above you, for example.
Aiming diagonally will allow you to zip around at a blistering pace. The change in pace from moving nowhere and demanding a jump button to flying through the air was alarming, often resulting in my flying off the edge of the stage and into the water, or into the line of fire of a guard.
You can string together grapples so that you can move through the levels like Tarzan moves through the jungle, but to do so you'd really need to be comfortable with the controls, and I am far from finding that comfort.
Moving through a door takes me to an underground stage, the colours switching a sickly green, and the maze-like caverns seeming to be largely featureless until I find a bunch of enemies tucked in one corner.
I'm playing on Easy, obviously, so these guys are a piece of cake, even when armed with rockets. Like games of the past, all the lines of fire can be worked out from how the stage is laid out. Can I only hit someone when I'm standing, do I have to dangle from a grapple somewhere, can I get them from a different platform?
If you like old-school platforming, you'll probably feel at home. If you like a jump button, and can't get to grips with your grapple, well, you'll feel far from it indeed.
The only door I see leads to a boss fight with this thing, which we had some knowledge of thanks to a hacking minigame revealing an audio log earlier on in the stage. Explosives are needed here, and you can grapple blue barrels to hurl them in some fashion. They're not red barrels, but surely they're explosive nonetheless? They are barrels in a video game...
Final Word
New mechanics take time to learn, I know that, but they're so much easier to learn if you want to experience the rest of the game, be it for the story, the characters, whatever. There is nothing here to convince me my time will be well-spent trying to nail these grapple physics.
The problem, I think, is that it is so faithful to the original game from the 1980s. It's dated, and it's a game for players who know that. It's not a reimagining of the game for new audiences - that would come later, and wouldn't be good enough to make it to the 1001 list, but I might like it better than this.
It's hard to judge how good Bionic Commando Rearmed is when I strongly dislike it from the start. I don't know how good a remake it is. I don't know how well made the mechanics are. All I can say for sure is that I don't want any more of it. I don't like how it looks, I don't like how it feels to play, and I don't see any reason to try again.
Fun Facts
The villain in the 1988 original was Adolf Hitler himself. They did at least change that for this remake.
Bionic Commando Rearmed, developed by Grin, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.