By Tom Selleck’s thick and dignified facial hair if MGS: Rising doesn’t look the dog’s sliced up bollocks. Seemingly offering a peerless level of fidelity when it comes to destroying the holy hell out of enemies and environments, it’s definitely got something rising in…no, we won’t go the innuendo route.
But while Kojima Productions latest looks like it could well redefine action games, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of Microsoft’s conference. More COD! More Gears! More Halo! Yawn. Read below to find out why we think Rising offers the only genuinely fresh experience we’ve seen at E3 so far. Oh, and treat your peepers to the video just down yonder, too.
Right, let’s try an experiment. We’re going to see if we can get through this entire article without talking about a certain hateful peripheral thall shalt not be named. If we do, then we’ll be rewarded with a shiny nickel and a new 360… probably.
Above: This chap looks a bit like the Beauty & the Beast unit from MGS4
Back to the Gear, then. This is not the really talky stealth ‘em up we all know and ‘occasionally-fall-asleep-during-its-of-the-60-minute-cut-scenes'… eh, we mean love. No, it’s a high-paced action game in the mould of Ninja Gaiden, which looks like it’ll be markedly different from past, more methodical Metal Gears.
In short, Rising represents a massive change in direction for its series. Sadly, this trend was in stark contrast to the rest of the games shown at the conference. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.
Do we know how to write an original pun, or do we know how to write an original pun? Our shit word play aside, Rising’s katana control looks like it offers levels of finesse and destructive power never seen before. Sure, Red Faction: Guerrilla had crumbling environments coming out of its revolutionary ass. But the destruction was rarely this precise. The slow-mo execution at the end looks like it might control similarly to Snake’s behind-the-shoulder aiming system from MGS4.
Above: Well, until Raiden rips him apart like Ash in Alien. Ewwwwww
Raiden’s weapon of win looks like it can dissect enemies and environmental objects with incredible accuracy. One of the game’s key features is described as ‘zan-dats’. Translated this means “cut and take”. This probably explains why our boy takes such pleasure in knifing up the baddie at the start of the trailer, before nicking his glowing spine. At a guess, we’d say said glowy spines are what power Raiden’s suit.
Above: It's all about those juicy spines.
