Bayonetta & Vanquish 10th Anniversary Bundle Review - Ten Years Later And Still A Blast to Play

Written by Stephen Varner on February 17, 2020

Reviews: Two fun action titles from the last generation still hold up today in this collection.

Two celebrated games from the Xbox 360 and PS3 have come to current-gen hardware but are these ports worth your money? Do these thrilling action games hold up a decade after their original release?

Bayonetta at the time of its release at the end of 2009 was one of the very best stylish action games on the Xbox 360 and PS3. It's tight controls, ludicrous combos and over the top finishers (all powered by Bayonetta's hair) all come together for one of the most satisfying combat experiences of its time and I'm happy to report that it holds up to this day. The buttery smooth 60fps ensures that you can always nail that perfect dodge and string together increasingly powerful strikes with Bayonetta's stiletto heel guns and demons summoned through portals so that the forces of heaven and hell erm...Paradiso and Inferno don't stand a chance. Taking heavy influence from Devil May Cry (right down to the 'Team Little Angels' nod) to its mixed melee/gunplay combat, Bayonetta knows exactly how over the top it is and leans all the way into it. Every second of it oozes style and confidence in both presentation and execution. It manages to tell a worthwhile story along the way and creates an interesting fiction that's expanded by journal pages you can collect throughout the game

If Bayonetta is a love letter to Devil May Cry then Vanquish is more like a middle finger to the cover shooters of its day. It's take on the genre was one that seemed to acknowledge what's cool stop and pop gameplay but also felt the need to kick everything into a higher gear. It's fast and frenetic pace balks at some of it's slower and more methodical peers and instead demands the utilization of not just it's cover mechanics but it's movement tools such as the rocket slide and its time slowing AR mode. This allows you to be aggressive on your way to the next objective or piece of cover and keeps the combat flowing moment to moment. It feels awesome to shoot down a couple minor enemies all while moving to flank a large enemy in the middle of combat space. Like Bayonetta before it, Vanquish leans into it's over serious sci-fi tropes and makes everything just ridiculous enough that you can't help but grin at it's referential nature to gruff dudes in military spacesuits.

It's worth noting that both of these games are effectively straight ports of the originals. There's no extra wrapper around them or fancy packaging to really celebrate the 10 year anniversary. You could say the games themselves do the talking by holding up as well as they do a full decade after release but if you're hoping for any bonus artwork or making of/retrospective type features in these games you'll be disappointed. What you do get is two of the best action games of the previous generation in their original form. They've just been freshened up a bit to run at a higher resolution (4K for the consoles that support it) and a rock-solid 60 frames. The downside to remasters visually is that prerendered cutscenes don't scale perfectly and there's a noticeable amount of artifacting and blurriness as the original image has been stretched. This isn't quite as noticeable in the stylized film grain vignettes that Bayonetta heavily features but it's there nonetheless. It doesn't do much to diminish the overall experience of the game however since during regular gameplay everything looks crisp, clean and sharp. Textures haven't been updated so don't expect a dramatic coat of paint over these games to make them look more modern but the bump in resolution goes a long way to clean up a pair of games that looked quite good a decade ago.

One odd thing I encountered while playing Bayonetta, in particular, was the music to VO balance seemed off enough that it made it hard to hear what was being said in cutscenes or during gameplay sequences. The game has subtitles on by default and you can adjust these volume levels individually so it wasn't really a problem once I found the right balance but go into it knowing you might have to fiddle with the volume settings a bit to find your preference.

There's been no shortage of HD remasters and rereleases this generation and while that may have been frustrating early on in the generation I think it's only become more welcome over time. Despite the varying quality and care put into the reissue of games it at the very least provides an easy way to bring some of the best games of their respective generations all under the umbrella of your preferred current-gen console. In the case of the Xbox One, however, these titles and their value become an interesting question as they're both already available via backward compatibility. You may even have them if you've been a Gold subscriber for the last couple of years as they've both been given away as part of the service. At that point, I think the question of value hangs on whether you have an Xbox One X and love these games enough to buy them again for a resolution boost. Or maybe you just really want to earn the achievements again. If you don't already own these games or you want to play them on your PS4 then I'd say don't hesitate. Despite being a few years old these are still two of the best action games on any platform and if you don't already own them then it's hard not to recommend playing this release of them.