Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance

Metal Gear Revengeance might be one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played.
Its no secret that im a massive fan of Platinum Games, and its games like this which remind me why - MGR is everything a game of this genre should be, fun, stylish, challenging and fun; the latter and former of which seem to be a dying quality in games of late, many games try so hard to be edgy or controversial that they forget the core aspect of why people play games in the first place, fun.

MGR is short, without the cutscenes it gets reduced to 'really fucking short' with my first playthrough taking only 4.5 hours - However every minute spent playing the game is frantic fun, and for this reason it feels substantially longer - there is hardly any downtime between scenes, no 'travel to this location' or 'head to extraction point', the whole game is 'kill these guys' 'now kill these guys' 'kill these guys too' which sounds boring in words, but killing guys is soooooo good. Combat flows smoothly and there are enough moves to keep you occupied (but if you just wanna mash X over and over and pretend its dynasty warriors, that's fine too), well timed parries are rewarded with zandatsu - which can be roughly translated to 'turn this guy into swiss cheese'.

Due to the combat mechanics of the game (recovering full health from finishing an enemy with zandatsu, and instant kill abilities), they have chosen to balance the game out by making the enemies hard as fuck - the special enemies you face are easily harder than those found in Ninja gaiden 2 or other similarly hard games, with a variety of attacks and some with unblockable grabs and such.

The music and setpieces in the game are probably the most memorable, ridiculous cutscenes followed up with angsty rock music and a multi-part boss battle, with the music building up to a climax as you slowly whittle down the bosses ridiculous health bar, every boss fight truly feels epic (a word i like to try and avoid using, but it seems fitting here), and the final boss is one that will be remembered for a long ass time.

If you get a chance to, I strongly recommend giving MGR a try, Games of this genre don't tend to stand the test of time in terms of pricing, so in 6 months or a year, be sure to buy this one when it falls in price.