You’ll be constantly thrown into gargantuan set pieces that may look cool, but more often than not feel sluggish and slow to play. Unfortunately, Bayonetta 3’s penchant for spectacle has a nasty habit of showing up at the worst of times. There are only four throughout the whole game so they hardly make a dent in the overall experience, but they were really something I was looking forward to nonetheless. Sadly, with its fairly half-baked mechanics, Jeanne’s levels struggle to really feel like much more than a small distraction. Unlike Bayonetta and Viola’s action-focused gameplay, Jeanne stars in her own side-scrolling stealth-based levels. Other than Viola, you’ll find yourself playing as Bayonetta’s greatest equal, the Umbran Witch Jeanne. She might have fewer options than Bayonetta, but given that Bayonetta is the star of the show this doesn’t feel overly egregious. It can be a bit disorientating switching between the two characters as the game decides who you play as in each chapter, but after adjusting to the change, fighting as Viola ended up feeling extremely satisfying. This energy is mirrored in her combat style which feels decidedly more scrappy and close quarters than Bayonetta’s. Compared to Bayonetta’s more overconfident and mature personality, Viola embodies a more energetic, brash energy, drawing heavily from a punk rock aesthetic. Hailing from an alternate reality destroyed by the Homunculi, Viola arrives to warn Bayonetta of the incoming threat. The biggest addition to Bayonetta 3 comes in the form of a new playable character, Viola. It’s nowhere near as crucial to the overall experience as the combat, but it’s an interesting and mostly welcomed evolution. The game still unfolds in a linear, level-based fashion, but the individual levels themselves contain more open sections for you to experiment with your movesets and find hidden collectibles. Similarly, the new Demon Masquerade ability allows Bayonetta to merge with the different demons she’ll work alongside throughout the campaign, giving her access to new navigational abilities, such as sprouting butterfly wings and flying through the air.īayonetta 3 ’s focus on more varied movement abilities complements a new, more open focus compared to its predecessors. The whole system feels very inspired by the Legions from PlatinumGames’s other Switch title, Astral Chain. The new Demon Slave technique allows Bayonetta to summon demons mid-battle and use their gargantuan strength for herself – or, to summon them at the end of a combo to deal massive additional damage. Most of the new additions to the core gameplay fare quite a bit better, however. It has a fairly annoying habit of pitting you against giant enemies with overly large health bars, and they can quickly become obtuse instead of challenging or engaging. Unfortunately, things can get a little hampered when the game starts leaning too heavily into spectacle. It might run the risk of demotivating some players, but it injects the game with a healthy dose of replayability at the same time. You’ll more than likely find yourself raking in a bunch of the middling medals on your first playthrough, but chasing down those higher ranks is something you shouldn’t worry about until repeat playthroughs when you’ve got a bit more experience under your belt. You’ll be rewarded with a medal at the end of each fight, ranging from stone up to platinum, based on your combo, completion time and damage taken. It’s the type of system that can feel accessible for most players, but still allows a lot of depth for those looking to push it to its limit. Mechanics like Bayonetta’s last-second dodge – which the game calls Witch Time – add a strong sense of risk versus reward to combat encounters. There’s never one best approach to any scenario, allowing you to improvise with the different weapons and combos you’ll learn throughout the game. The main star of the show is the game’s intricately designed combat system, which manages to strike an excellent balance between spectacle and technical depth. Despite a new multiversal scope, the core Bayonetta gameplay remains largely the same. After a long five-year wait following its reveal at the 2017 Game Awards, Bayonetta 3 has finally arrived on the Nintendo Switch, and for the most part, it was worth the wait.Īfter fighting angels and demons in the past, this time the titular witch takes on a new threat of human bioweapons called Homunculi that threaten not only the universe but countless other realities within the multiverse. Fast forward to now, and Bayonetta hangs out exclusively with the Nintendo crowd, for the second time in fact. Back in 2009, you’d be hard-pressed to think that the ultra-raunchy Bayonetta series would ever have anything to do with the squeaky clean, family-friendly Nintendo.
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