Bionic Commando: Rearmed

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I completed Bionic Commando Rearmed on Windows 11. I encourage you to read this review if you intend to do the same, as it [b]does not launch properly on Windows 11[/b]. [h3]WINDOWS 11 NOTES[/h3] After installing, the game will silently crash on launch, without even citing an error. Doing the following two things fixed it for me: 1: Install legacy NVidia PhysX drivers which the game relies upon. The following link should take you to NVidia's site. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/physx/9_10_0224/physx-9-10-0224-driver/ I have seen other users use up to version 9-13 as well. 2: Restart your computer -- Mine did not work until I restarted after the install. 3: Write over the game's installed EXE with a patched version. The file is hosted on a Google Drive (use at your own risk, but I experienced no problems): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C7cJgaaf5-NQ1iqbRiHCm7Oot21LE2KS/view This patched EXE will also fix some issues that prevent the hacking minigame from working properly on high-resolution monitors. [h3]REVIEW[/h3] I did not play this in co-op, and I doubt any of my friends would be interested. Might be fun, hard to say. To be frank, as I finished Bionic Commando Rearmed, I started feeling more negatively toward it. But I'll give it a very shaky thumbs up because it's got the job of adapting jank NES gameplay to modern controllers. It was always gonna be weird. And once I got used to the game's controls, I did find myself having a lot of fun with mechanics that felt novel, particularly compared to today's games which often follow the same cookie-cutter solutions for game mechanics. If you're a fan of mechanical novelty, it might be worth a play for you. But my recommendation still comes with caveats. This game was an early XBox Live Arcade title for the 360, and I was actually working at Microsoft when it was in testing there, so I heard a bit about it from testers. I heard mixed reviews. Perhaps it was for nostalgia of that time that I wanted to go back and finally give it a shot. First getting into it, the first thing you'll notice is the dated visuals. It looks better than an NES game, and the 2D art for the portraits is surprisingly good, but the tiling textures and basic lighting don't really hold up. The next thing you'll notice is the odd controls, It may be a turnoff at first. "Guys are shooting me and I can't JUMP over the bullet?? You may think you have to face-tank the shots, and the game will generously provide you with HP from killed enemies, so you can get through most of the game this way. But you can actually deflect bullets with your robo-arm. I did begin enjoying the novelty of the robo-arm mechanics. At first it feels unnecessarily picky and awkward to use. But once you get the hang of it, you can be surprisingly nimble. This is where the game actually shines -- but you'll need to train and abandon some of your expectations. The real problems of this game come with the combination of jank and precision-difficulty. This is particularly noticeable in some of the new content in the form of dozens of challenge chambers. At first these are breezy and fun to speedrun to hone your grappling skills. I actually imagined I would grind through them all to get 5 stars, because I was having fun! But as you continue to play them and unlock more, you'll find that a lot of the levels seem to rely on jank and techniques that you'd never intuit, and are certainly never tutorialized. I'm pretty hardcore about my games and I frankly just gave up on them and I still couldn't tell you how they're even possible. Not because of the skill required, but because I literally have no idea how they could work mechanically. Now, it's possible that even if I knew how these were supposed to be done, they'd be too hard for me and I'd give up. But as it stands I wasn't learning from failure. It was just confusing as to what I was supposed to do! The final level is a long and punishing slog, punctuated by a bossfight that must be won in a very specific way which is not taught very clearly. This sorta colored the whole experience and made me almost leave a negative review. Fans of the original will also complain that the final level really diverges from the original, so it fails on that front as well. The rest of the content is serviceable. Varied level designs. Each boss is presented twice, and is harder the second time. You get quite a few guns and they're pretty unique. Tons of secrets that I didn't find. If you like this game there's a lot to do. For me, I was happy to put it down once I beat my skull through the final bossfight.