This game is okay. I wanted to love it. I love the first and second entries, and gobbled them up in the span of a few days after starting them, but this one took me months of revisiting it to get through.This game tries to pepper in so many different new things, and frankly very few of them work well enough to commend their addition. If you distill the experience down to the moments when you're just Bayonetta kicking some ass, it's fine. Otherwise, it has cracks all over the place.
The story is just a mess. Not that Bayonetta has been known for great storytelling, but the one they put together here feels particularly sloppy and strung together. Jeanne is now relegated to sidemissions (which is a weird thing to call missions that are not optional, but whatever) that are these uninteresting, side-scrolling, sneak-through-some-hallways affairs. There's a new character, Viola, but her combat style just does not compare to the fluidity of Bayonetta's and is a chore to play as (yes, even post 1.2 patch where they made her feel better, but still not great). Luckily and unluckily she's only playable in a few chapters, so you don't have to suffer much, but you also don't really have a reason to give her a fair shake and try to get better as her. I didn't find the demon summoning aspect of this game to be that intuitive either; it didn't feel good to use like 80% of the time, beyond as part of a combo. It also introduces a ton of unlocks and equipment management, that roughly halfway through the game I just got overwhelmed and gave up on experimenting with, sticking to what I already knew how to use.
Honestly I can excuse a lot of that, but what irked me the most is this game has pretty bad performance. Some might not be sensitive to it, but its framerate is constantly all over the place. Environments often feel barren, I presume to save on processing power, and have noticeably low-res texture work in a lot of places. On top of that, this game uses this weird dithering effect on almost everything that moves or has transparency that takes me back to the PS1 days. It just feels like they sacrificed a lot to get this running good enough on the Switch hardware.
Again, I think this game is playable, and I enjoyed it well enough at certain times, but it doesn't come close to its predecessors. I already waited like half a decade for this game; honestly I kind of wish it cooked in the oven a little longer.
The story is just a mess. Not that Bayonetta has been known for great storytelling, but the one they put together here feels particularly sloppy and strung together. Jeanne is now relegated to sidemissions (which is a weird thing to call missions that are not optional, but whatever) that are these uninteresting, side-scrolling, sneak-through-some-hallways affairs. There's a new character, Viola, but her combat style just does not compare to the fluidity of Bayonetta's and is a chore to play as (yes, even post 1.2 patch where they made her feel better, but still not great). Luckily and unluckily she's only playable in a few chapters, so you don't have to suffer much, but you also don't really have a reason to give her a fair shake and try to get better as her. I didn't find the demon summoning aspect of this game to be that intuitive either; it didn't feel good to use like 80% of the time, beyond as part of a combo. It also introduces a ton of unlocks and equipment management, that roughly halfway through the game I just got overwhelmed and gave up on experimenting with, sticking to what I already knew how to use.
Honestly I can excuse a lot of that, but what irked me the most is this game has pretty bad performance. Some might not be sensitive to it, but its framerate is constantly all over the place. Environments often feel barren, I presume to save on processing power, and have noticeably low-res texture work in a lot of places. On top of that, this game uses this weird dithering effect on almost everything that moves or has transparency that takes me back to the PS1 days. It just feels like they sacrificed a lot to get this running good enough on the Switch hardware.
Again, I think this game is playable, and I enjoyed it well enough at certain times, but it doesn't come close to its predecessors. I already waited like half a decade for this game; honestly I kind of wish it cooked in the oven a little longer.