Reasons Why You Should Be Excited About Metal Gear Rising: Out Today!

Metal Gear fan or not, today is your lucky day because Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has landed on our digital shelves! The keen-eyed and eared among you will be aware that this isn’t your typical Metal Gear excursion and in fact there’s barely a momentary glance in the vague direction of stealth! Don’t let that discourage you though; we’re massive fans of sneaky-snakey stealthing our way through every game Konami throw at us, and we’re seriously ENAMOURED with Rising. But why?

MGR: Revengeance focuses on MGS2 star Raiden, and those of you that got round to playing the PS3 entry, Metal Gear Solid 4, will know this to be a very good thing. Whilst he’s predominately an insufferably whiny git throughout his debut, he returns in MGS4 as what can only be described as a Badass Ninja. Honestly. We tried to find other words. Nothing fit.

Naturally then, you might expect Raiden’s own game to be a Hack/Slash affair, and it is. Fortunately though there’s a satiating and perplexing layer to the game’s integral parry system, exemplified in the very first boss fight. If you don’t learn to parry, by pressing X (360) and pointing the analogue stick in the direction from which you are being attacked, you will die. Quickly. It’s a tricky old technique to get the hang of, but once you do, it’s supremely satisfying.

Of course Raiden’s blade is the other big hitter for the game, allowing you to precision-slice enemies, scenery, watermelons, and just about anything else you can find into the kind of neat stack you’d expect to find presented on a cheese board. The first thing we did was chop up a supporting pillar for a bridge, which was tremendous fun until we realized we needed that bridge and had to reload. You’ll spend hours in blade mode just seeing how things fall to bits as you wildly slice and dice like Edward Scissor hands learning Kung-Fu.

Developer Platinum Games are knocking out gem after gem at the moment and Rising is the pinnacle, stellar performance they’ve been building up to. You guys need this game. Order it now from the Hitari store, and let us know what you reckon! And if Rising simply isn’t your bag, Crysis 3 is out today as well!