It's time for a whole new generation of gamers to get into a pair of classic games from the masters of over-the-top action at Platinum Games! Bayonetta Firing up Bayonetta, there's a fairly obvious comparison to be made - it looks a lot like Devil May Cry. While Bayonetta is not the latest DMC game, however, it is the brainchild of Hideki Kamiya, the creator of Devil May Cry. While Bayonetta is set in the same twilight demi-monde as the DMC series, instead of featuring Dante, this new game features a statuesque leather-cum-hair clad witch who carries the same name as the game. Bayonetta is a witch, and she wields the dark arts. The game's story revolves her having been missing for 500 years and then woken up with little memory of who she is. Unfortunately, she's found herself stuck in the middle of a pitched battle between good and evil, and she's on no one's side but her own. Her opponents are angels and heavenly hosts who she has to defeat on a daily basis to avoid being thrust down to hell, so the morality of the storyline is ambiguous to say the least. Bayonetta is, basically, a series of boss battles linked by a series of high-camp cut scenes. There is exploring and collecting items, but not so much that you'll actually notice it. Bayonetta is more about fighting one huge and apparently invincible monster before going on to then battle two of the same monster, with some other smaller monsters thrown in for measure. That, when you get down to it, is what Bayonetta's all about - fast, furious, all-out combat. You wield weapons from a garden-variety samurai sword to a fireball-producing heavenly horn to guns that take the place of your bootheels. Vanquish Vanquish is not, in fact, the stain-removal product it sounds like. It's a third-person shooter set in space and it treats the shoot-'em-up genre in much the same way Bayonetta treats the brawler genre - with a great big grin on its face. You play as Sam Gideon, a former college athlete and now agent of DARPA (the US army's R&D initiative - it's a real thing). Sam gets to wear DARPA's ARS (Augmented Reaction Suit) and, thanks to the actions of some nefarious Russians, take it into space in the name of not getting New York shot by a giant microwave beam from space. Sam trots off into orbit with crusty old wardog Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Burns (not the Scottish poet) and a small team of marines to take back the satellite the microwave beam's sat on. It's not just any old satellite, either - it's home to some 30 million Americans, making for some pretty interesting environments. Beyond making you a bit stronger, faster and generally harder, the suit does a couple of things that your average pair of combat pants doesn't. Firstly, it gives you thrusters packed into your legs. The effect is that you can skid around the floor at ridiculous speeds on your behind or your knees until the ARS over-heats. The other ability the ARS grants you is a bit more standard - bullet time. This kicks in either when you're about to die or when you manually activate it by aiming and performing an evasive manoeuvre simultaneously. The combination of these two abilities opens Vanquish up to make it play like few other shooters out there. It's fast, furious and manic - a combination that adds up a mad dollop of fun.
