Bionic Commando Rearmed Impressions

As many of you are aware, I thoroughly enjoyed the original Bionic Commando. What can I say, I'm a fool for the classics. I'm especially fond of classics which include Hitler's face exploding. This week Bionic Commando Rearmed launched for the Xbox 360, PC and PS3. I've been quite literally sitting on the edge of my couch in anticipation for this title, and it proved not to disappoint.

To the uninformed, BCR is a faithful remake of the NES title Bionic Commando. The game has been tile-for-8bit-tile reconstructed in beautiful 3d, painstakingly recreating every nuance of the game play. The developers wished to capture the essence of the game, while creating expanding the experience with new content and features. Like many remakes, my biggest fear was that the game play would be irreparably changed, the dynamics disturbed or other issues that often plague these kinds of titles. There have been numerous changes made to BCR, but unlike it's ported brethren the alterations do in fact improve the title.

The core system is the same, so you all can breathe a sigh of relief. Our good old commando still can't jump, and his arm still can only point in one of 5 directions. That means all those crazy trick shots with exact timing and still exactly the way we left them. He still swings the same number of times if you pull yourself up on a platform while having horizontal momentum. You can still only crouch, jog at a brisk pace. Essentially, the platform aspect of the game remains unaltered.

The differences, however, are fairly profound. The developers had decided early on in the project that boss fights in the original Bionic Commando were rather dull. Looking back, they were rather uninteresting. Most of the missions usually ended with blowing up the core of some anonymous machine. Now each level has replaced the almost singular boss with an array of 12 different end-bosses, each with its own specific method of being defeated.

One of the more irritating aspects of the game, the item select screen, has been completely removed. Now players can switch between weapons during game play by using the shoulder buttons on the 360. This mechanic is further expanded with enemies now have varying strengths and weaknesses against different weapon classes.

The communication system has been slightly updated. Now when hacking a machine, it is not simply a matter of selecting an option and suddenly you're capable of tapping into enemy transmissions. Now there is a short mini-game of varying difficulty that must be completed to keep your presence disguised from your foes.

Players are also now treated with level "secrets". Each area now has several hidden places, containing tokens providing access to "challenge rooms", items, power-ups and special achievement tokens called "yashichis". As a self proclaimed collection junkie, this both irritates and amuses me. There is also a new co-operative mode, which is unfortunately not a feature that I am yet able to try.

If the core game simply is not enough for you, there is also the addition of the challenge rooms. This feature adds upwards from 50 "virtual" rooms which provide the simple task of getting from one point to another without dying in a fixed amount of time. Completing the rooms more quickly provides a higher score, and subsequently bragging rights to all your friends.

Bionic Commando Rearmed ultimately lead the my inevitable discovery that Xbox Live Arcade titles do not always (if ever) launch at the stroke of midnight... or 2 am for that matter. If you are a fan of the original, this is well worth at least a demo download. I really can't praise this game enough, as a fan of platformers and the original title it more than lived up to my expectations.