With the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance demo having just recently gone up on both Xbox Live and the Playstation Store, now is the perfect time to preview what is available to play of the game. This demo is one that has been available to players previously through public trade events such as Gamescom in Germany and Eurogamer Expo in London. Finally it has arrived into the homes of all the eager fans that have been patiently waiting to be able to play the game for themselves. This demo was played on the PS3.

When starting the demo, players only have the option of easy or normal. The hard option is locked out, perhaps to save players from an impending doom that may befall them upon release of the game in late February. It then asks whether the player wants to play through the tutorial. For those who are unfamiliar with the action style by Platinum Games, or to gain some familiarity with the feel of the game and control scheme, it is a good idea to take this tutorial. As with many tutorials, it explains to the player about the control method used in Metal Gear Rising and pays particular attention to the ‘Blade Mode’ mechanic (including hacking away at a nice set of watermelons with extreme precision!). In this mode, players can slow down time to make precision slices with Raiden’s blade. The left stick is used for moving around the camera to aim around, and the right stick is for free aiming. As well as this, these are your supplementary regular attacks, square for a wide attack and triangle for a strong attack.

After this ‘V.R. training’ tutorial, players are presented with an overview of the events both leading up to, and in the demo. After a cutscene players are given control of Raiden. At this point players are free to play through the demo as they wish, whether it be whizzing through slicing and dicing enemies or just taking the time to take in how great the game looks. For a game that can have almost anything cut up and destroyed with your blade, it still maintains a superb graphical style. Perhaps this is why the demo racks up a huge download size of 3.4GB, all that destructible environment must use up a lot of data, and for a 15 minute demo, one can only imagine the quantity of data the full game will require.

Returning to the topic of destructible environments, a large portion of structures around the world can be sliced up. For example, a bridge in the starting area is to be used to reach the next point of the demo can be cut up. This doesn’t mean that it will stop Raiden from advancing; there are also other less obvious ways of reaching the next area. This is a good demonstration of the multiple paths present in the game, which compensate for the added feature of carving down everything in sight.

As explained earlier, the combat takes the form of very simple controls, the wide and strong attacks, and the blade mode. Raiden can also parry enemy attacks away with the combination of pushing the left stick in the direction of the attacking enemy + square. This can take a while to get used to, as it us a unique method of carrying out a parry, however it will be a great tool in the hands of one who manages to master it, pushing back those enemy attacks and taking the advantage to get in some attacks. The only real issue with the combat is the lack of any sort of dodging. A parry can only do so much, but even with it being your only direct defence against attacking enemies, other than simply running away, it still doesn’t manage to take anything away from the gameplay.

Once enemies have been damaged enough, time will slow down briefly. In this moment players are given the opportunity to use the blade mode. A circle target will appear on the enemy, and if this is sliced through, Raiden will get the opportunity (by pressing circle when prompted) to obtain a blue fuel cell that will replenish not only his fuel metre, but also his health metre. This is a neat little feature to ensure Raiden keeps his health and fuel up whilst taking care of enemies and not having to worry about using recovery items.

The demo plays in a very linear fashion, but this is the purpose of this demo, to demonstrate the main features of Metal Gear Rising all in one play-through. This is all present and accounted for with the inclusion of all that is expected of both a Platinum Games title and a Metal Gear title. All of the intense combat, Metal Gear cutscenes, alert phases, codec moments and to top it all off, an awesome boss fight with a mechanical talking dog with a chainsaw tail.

There is absolutely no doubt that it is a Platinum Games title, and this is a great thing as they have taken almost everything that anybody could have asked for in a high action Metal Gear game, and implemented it. It doesn’t feel at all like any previous ‘Metal Gear’ titles, but this is good, it shouldn’t. This demo of Metal Gear Rising plays like its own game, and upon the release of the full title, many gamers will be in for a treat. But until then, they have this demo to tide them over and it should keep the fans very occupied.