4.5/5 ★ – Gibdorf's review of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

I've never been the absolute biggest fan of action games but Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance still managed to be an amazing experience. This is without a doubt the funniest video game I've ever played. I laughed out loud multiple times while playing and to make it even better the game plays it straight the entire time. Raiden will be running vertically down a falling clocktower dodging missiles being shot at him by a giant robot while the most over the top music I've ever heard is playing: only to then jump off the clocktower and cut the robot in half. Ridiculous stuff like that which I can only describe as a ten year olds idea of what an M rated game should be happens constantly throughout the game and I am such a sucker for it. The story and characters also take a similar approach with people being so campy it's hard not to love all of them. The story itself never has any crazy twists or turns, however, due to the absurd nature of everything happening it's still enjoyable. Plus there's not so subtle themes of philosophy and political commentary that I found entertaining. As for the actual combat of the game it's great. I was initially disappointed by the parry system because it serves as a block and not a counter like I'm used to in most games, however, I grew to love it as the game went on. It was so satisfying fighting a boss and parrying 6 of their attacks in a row to then release a barrage of sword attacks. Parrying is also easy to do but still feels rewarding: you just need to look out for the red indicator of their weapon and then press X will holding the stick in their direction. Admittedly there were sometimes were my character would do an attack instead of parrying which was always frustrating but it didn't happen enough for it to be an issue. My only real complaint about the combat is that there was never a reason to do any cool combos. All I did was press Y to attack the entire game and I never got punished for it which blew. I was looking forward to having to use different attacks in different scenarios but nowhere was it even close to necessary. I even got S rank a few times doing this so it also seemingly doesn't affect style rankings. That doesn't mean all fights are the same though, since different enemies have different patterns, and almost all bosses have a fun gimmick of some sort that makes them enjoyable to learn and stick out from the others. Finally the aforementioned music in this game is top notch. It's so over comically intense it's impossible not to crack a smile while listening to and if that wasn't good enough the music is adaptive in boss fights. As you progress through different phases of the fight more instruments and vocals kick in. If you're like me and have always wanted to play Metal Gear games but haven't been able to get into the other entires I highly recommend this one.