Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Understand what this game is before you judge what it does. Metal Gear Solid: Rising was a Kojima Productions project that fell apart. The pitch — a sword game where you could slice anything, anywhere, along any plane — turned out to be a technical and design problem nobody at the studio could solve on schedule. Rather than kill it, Kojima Productions handed the wreckage to PlatinumGames in late 2011. Platinum kept exactly one thing: the free-cutting technology. Everything else — the stealth structure, the tone, the protagonist’s entire moveset — got thrown out and rebuilt around what Platinum actually knew how to do, which is aggressive, frame-tight character action. The result shipped in February 2013, and the PC version arrived on Steam in January 2014.

That history matters, because Revengeance plays like a game with two authors arguing in public, and the argument is the best part. The Metal Gear side supplies the geopolitical sermonizing, the codec calls, the four-years-after-MGS4 continuity, and a villain who delivers a thesis on American decline while suplexing you through a helipad. The Platinum side supplies a combat system with no dodge button, no invincibility frames worth relying on, and a parry window measured in fractions of a second. Neither side compromises. The tonal whiplash — solemn lecture on child soldiers, then a boss fight scored with a vocal metal track that only kicks in its lyrics when you break the enemy’s second health gate — is the identity, not a flaw in it.

Commercially, it sat awkwardly in 2013: too weird for Metal Gear purists, too short for value-per-hour spreadsheets, too expensive at launch. A decade later that has largely inverted. It holds an 83 on Metacritic, and its reputation has only grown since. The Steam SKU bundles all three DLC campaigns and every unlockable skin, and it is frequently discounted. What was a difficult sell at launch is now an easy one.

• Blade Mode: The mechanic the original team couldn’t ship. Time slows, the camera locks in, and you take direct manual control of the katana’s cutting plane on the right stick or mouse. You are not selecting from canned animations — you are choosing an arbitrary angle through geometry, and the game cuts along it. Watermelons, pillars, Metal Gear RAY’s leg, a soldier into dozens of pieces. It still has no real imitators, which tells you how hard it was.
• Zandatsu: Blade Mode is not a cutscene generator, it is your resource economy. Sever an enemy at the highlighted spine, grab the exposed core, crush it. You get a substantial heal and a Blade Mode refill instantly. The game heals you only when you attack, which means the correct response to being nearly dead is to charge. That single design decision reorients the entire genre’s risk logic.
• Parry-as-defense: No dodge button in your default kit. You block by pressing light attack into the incoming strike — direction matters, timing matters, and a perfect input opens the attacker for a counter. It is unfriendly for the first two hours and among the most rewarding defensive systems in the genre once it clicks.
• The complete Steam package: Blade Wolf, Jetstream, and VR Missions DLC included; skins spanning White Armor, Inferno Armor, Commando Armor, the MGS4 body, and Cyborg Ninja; codec and cutscene replay; boss rush; and per-mission ranked scoring built to be re-run.
• Adaptive metal score: Jamie Christopherson’s soundtrack is state-aware. Boss themes escalate by phase, and the vocals land on transitions. It is scoring as feedback channel, not wallpaper.

The gameplay loop

Most character action games are conversations about space. You maintain distance, you punish openings, you retreat to heal. Revengeance deletes the retreat. There are healing items, but they are scarce, capped, and on higher difficulties functionally a bailout you shouldn’t be planning around. Health comes from Zandatsu, Zandatsu comes from Blade Mode, Blade Mode fuel comes from Zandatsu. The loop closes on itself and pulls you forward.

Play it timidly and it is a mediocre, camera-cursed brawler. Play it correctly and it becomes something close to rhythm gaming. The tell is that every enemy telegraph is honest — a red flash for parryable, a yellow-orange flash for unblockable strikes you must sidestep or interrupt. Once you internalize that vocabulary, encounters stop being combat puzzles and become timing charts, and the game’s real difficulty curve — Revengeance difficulty, where near everything one-shots you — becomes not just survivable but the definitive way to play. Few games change character so completely between difficulty settings.

The friction is real and needs no softening. The parry is under-taught. The tutorial mentions it; the game never drills it, never gates progress on it, and the design leaves room to reach Monsoon still mashing. That is a coaching failure, not a mechanical one. The camera is the other genuine defect — in tight corridors, against multiple large enemies, or during Ninja Run traversal, it loses the plot and damage arrives from something offscreen. Platinum’s lock-on is functional but not sufficient. These are not fatal, but a 2013 game’s camera is a 2013 game’s camera, and no amount of cult affection changes that.

Bosses as the actual product

The campaign is a delivery mechanism for its bosses, and it barely pretends otherwise. Mistral, Monsoon, Sundowner, Jetstream Sam, Senator Armstrong — each is a discrete combat thesis with its own counterplay and its own escalation. Monsoon’s magnetic disassembly, forcing you to read a body that keeps coming apart. Sam’s duel, which is nearly pure parry-check and is where the system finally clicks. Armstrong, who abandons swordplay entirely for a fistfight against a man made of nanomachines while the track goes full arena-rock.

Between them sits the weaker material: mid-chapter corridor fights, a vestigial stealth system with a cardboard box that exists mostly as a joke, and a couple of stretches — the sewers, the Denver approach — where pacing sags. The campaign is short by any standard. That is the obvious complaint and it is a fair one.

Why the length complaint is mostly wrong

It is correct, and it misreads the product. This is a scored game. Every mission grades you on time, damage taken, kills, and Zandatsu count, and the difference between a B and an S rank is not persistence — it is a different, better, more aggressive way of playing that has to be learned. The main campaign is the tutorial for the actual game, which is chasing S ranks across five difficulty tiers, plus VR Missions, plus boss rush, plus Jetstream’s campaign where Sam plays fundamentally differently from Raiden — heavier, more counter-dependent, less forgiving.

Judged as an evening-length narrative, it is expensive at list price. Judged as a mastery system, the short campaign is the onboarding, and the content ceiling outlasts it many times over. Which framing applies depends entirely on whether you replay games. Be honest with yourself about that before buying, because it is the single variable that determines the experience here.

The art direction has aged far better than the resolution has. Raiden’s white cyborg frame against industrial browns and Denver sunset orange still reads instantly, and the cutting tech remains the visual centerpiece — geometry parting cleanly along a plane you chose, in real time, with debris that obeys physics. Few games match the tactility.

Underneath, though, it is a 2013 console game. Textures are muddy under scrutiny, environments are corridors dressed as cities, and the crowd and foliage density is what it is. Platinum’s engine work was built around a 60fps target rather than out-rendering anyone, and that priority is legible in every asset.

The PC port is competent rather than lavish. There are real resolution options, anti-aliasing choices, shadow and effects toggles, and framerate settings — including uncapping. Uncapping deserves a caution: the simulation was designed around 60, and running well beyond it risks physics and animation oddities. A locked 60, or a sane cap at your refresh rate, is the intended experience. A game of this scope from 2013 is light on hardware, and the install is tiny by modern standards.

Steam is the only place you can legitimately buy this now, and that consolidation is recent. The TransGaming Mac App Store port from 2014 is gone. The NVIDIA Shield Android TV release from 2016 has been delisted and its store page 404s. There is no Switch version and no iOS version. Anyone telling you otherwise is describing a dead listing.

Play it on a controller. This is not snobbery. The parry is a directional input into an incoming attack, and analog stick direction plus a face button is a cleaner expression of that than WASD plus a mouse button. Blade Mode is the exception — free-aiming a cutting plane with a mouse is more precise than with a right stick, and for hunting perfect Zandatsu angles or the sillier VR challenges, mouse cutting is a real advantage. Most players will still be better served overall by a pad. Controller support is proper, with correct prompts and no remapping archaeology required.

The PC version also carries a mod scene worth knowing about — model swaps, camera tweaks, and quality-of-life patches the community built over a decade. Nothing essential, but it is a meaningful reason the Steam SKU is the one to get.

Revengeance should not work. It was a rescue job on a cancelled project, built in roughly a year, welding a slow-burn stealth franchise to a studio that makes the fastest games in the business. The result is uneven in exactly the places you’d predict — pacing, camera, tutorialization, runtime — and excellent in the one place that matters, which is the moment-to-moment act of fighting.

What keeps it alive is that the core system was never solved by anyone else. Blade Mode has no successor. Healing-through-aggression has been imitated in pieces but never with this much conviction. And the parry, once it lands, produces a feeling of legibility — of a fight becoming readable — that very few games in any genre deliver. Its meme afterlife is a symptom of that, not a substitute for it; people don’t keep quoting a game they stopped playing.

We recommend it. At list price the length argument has some teeth. On sale, with three DLC campaigns attached, there is no argument left to have. Set aside the first two hours to be worse at it than expected, learn the parry properly, and then play it again on Hard. The second run is where it pays off.