Bionic Commando

He's not angry, just misunderstood

HIGH Hanging motionless for a split second a hundred feet in the air above a boss before crashing down on it bionic fist first.

LOW Fumbling ineptly with certain biomech enemies for a large amount of time before discovering their weakness.

WTF When replaying certain sections, the in-game chatter is sometimes replaced with more profane versions of the same sentence.

If you've been reading this blog then you will know that I was quite impressed with the recent Bionic Commando game, updated and re-imagined by Swedish developer GRIN. So impressed, in fact, that I felt motivated to track down someone on the development team and ask them a few questions about their superb effort.

Thankfully, Bionic Commando producer Dan Eriksson was quite willing to chat with me for a bit about the work involved in reinventing such a classic game.

Reaching into the past with a bionic grip

HIGH Mastering the arm and swinging effortlessly through levels.

LOW Some checkpoints are set too far apart.

WTF The elements of a great story are here, they're just hardly used.

Expectations are an important issue to deal with for anyone, but doubly so for a critic. After all, we are supposed to be "neutral and unbiased" when we evaluate, right? Of course, it's absolutely impossible to be without some sort of penchant or leaning—we wouldn't be human, otherwise. But, although it's not realistic to sit down with a game and approach it as a completely blank slate, managing expectations is something that could, and should be done.