Dan Geeks Out: Video Game Review #359: Bionic Commando

Bionic Commando

Nintendo Entertainment System

Nostalgia Factor:

Bionic Commando is a game that I’ve known about for a long time, and one that I’ve always wanted to play. It came out in 1988, so why did I wait to play it until 2022? I have no idea. It was just a game that I didn’t own growing up. I didn’t know anyone else who owned it. I never got the opportunity to play it. Before I knew it, I had moved on from the NES and onto the Sega Genesis. Then onto the Saturn, and then the Nintendo 64, and then the PlayStation – so on and so forth. Bionic Commando quickly became a distant memory.

How would I enjoy the game after playing it for the first time, about 34 years after its initial release? Let’s find out! Mop Up Duty continues with 1988’s Bionic Commando.

Story:

Bionic Commando is the poster child for the terrible Japanese to English text translations we were all so familiar with back in the NES days. Reading the in-game introduction to the storyline made me laugh out loud several times. The broken English is just so amazing. The basic gist of the game is that a Nazi-like group has discovered a set of plans, refered to as Project Albatross (although what this project is is never made clear) that they plan to use against their enemy, the Federation. No, not the Star Trek Federation. That would be a completely different story.

The Federation sends in their best soldier, Super Joe, to retrieve these plans, but he is captured. I didn’t know this but apparently Super Joe is the main protagonist in 1985’s Commando for the NES, a game that I have never played. Nice little nugget of trivia there. Since their original plan worked so well, the Federation decides to send in another operative – the titular Bionic Commando (his name is Ladd) – to rescue Super Joe and discover the secret behind Project Albatross.

Gameplay:

This game has a bit of a learning curve to it. When you first start playing you are greeted by an overhead map with a ton of different numbered tiles on the screen. You start on the tile marked zero, a helicopter icon marking your place on the map. You’ll notice green truck icons moving around on the other side of the map, but you don’t have to worry about those quite yet. Your basic goal is to hit up each location on the map in the order you see them. White numbered tiles indicate an action stage that you have to complete, while red numbered tiles indicate neutral locations filled with hospital tents and soldier encampments. Visiting these neutral locations and exploring every building is key to completing this game, as you’ll find these locations contain many essential items that you’ll need down the road. Just make sure you don’t fire your weapon in these locations, as enemies will swarm you and attack you incessantly if you do so.

The action stages are where the meat and potatoes of this game take place. They play out more like your typical NES side-scrolling game. You have a defined start location and an ending location, where you typically fight a boss character or destroy one of the enemy’s super computers (or both). Using the D-pad, you can move your character left and right. You can duck. You can shoot. But you’ll quickly notice that one major element from most NES side-scrollers is absent: you can’t jump. This is a bit jarring at first, and I can’t say it didn’t take me a while to get used to. In lieu of jumping, you have a mechanical arm that acts like a grappling hook that you can use to swing over obstacles and pull yourself up to higher locations. It may seem like just a silly gimmick, but mastering the use of your grappling hook arm is essential if you want to beat Bionic Commando. Although it did take a me a while to adjust to this game mechanic, after a while it became second nature to me.

During each action stage you’ll come across a computer that gives you the option to communicate with your fellow troops back at the base or eavesdrop on enemy communications. I’m not sure if it is essential that you use these stations or not, but I did it anyway just to be on the safe side. I didn’t want to have to backtrack and find them again. As you get deeper into the game you’ll collect different colored pieces of radio equipment which you’ll need to equip in order to make these communication stations work. If you have the wrong color equipped, all you get is a garbled message in return. Again, I don’t know if it is essential or not to listen to these messages with the right piece of colored equipment in your inventory, but even if I didn’t have the right equipment I’d still listen to these garbled messages anyway on the chance that simply listening to them unlocks something, even if you can’t understand what it is.

Every time you enter a new stage, the game asks you what equipment you’d like to take with you. As you play you’ll unlock different guns and different special items (like one that refills your health) that you can take with you.

Your ultimate goal is to play through each stage until you get to the last level. Beat the last level and you beat the game. Hurrah! The ending cinematic shows Hitler’s face exploding in a mass of blood and gore, which is pretty cool. Pretty unexpected, too, for such an early NES game.

Oh, the green trucks! I forgot to mention them. When you do encounter a green truck on the overhead map between stages, you are forced into a battle against an enemy battalion. These battles take place from an overhead perspective, similar to what you’d see in a game like Rambo: First Blood Part II or Gun.smoke. No worries, though, these stages are laughably easy and I breezed through them without getting hit once. The game on the whole, however, is fairly difficult – even if you know what you are doing. Many of the swinging moves that you pull off have to be done 100% perfectly or you risk falling in a pit of spikes or some other kind of hazard that will lead to your immediate death. Bionic Commando is a long game, too, so you want to be really cautious as you play. Nothing sucks more than sinking several hours into a game and then having to restart it from the beginning because you ran out of lives. Luckily I didn’t have to worry about that, as I played this game on my RetroPie using save states. But I can just imagine playing this as a kid back in the 80s and getting frustrated by this.

Graphics:

Bionic Commando may not look like much on first glance. The outside areas are pretty basic looking, and the color palette used for this game looks like it was pulled directly from a Crayola crayon box. That said, I think this game has a charming look to it, especially when you enter buildings. The background textures and the small details you see when you are inside remind me of something from Metroid or Mega Man.

The enemies look good. The boss characters look even better. Even the “cutscenes” have a nice flair to them. It’s not the best looking NES game out there, but the effort put into this game is certainly admirable.

Sound:

This game has a classic NES soundtrack, also worthy of any Mega Man-type game. It's upbeat. It gets you into the game. I love it. When music is done right in NES games it can be so, so awesome. The downside? I'm not sure if it's catchy enough to have stuck with me. I'm only a few days removed from playing this game and I already can't remember any specific musical tracks. All I can remember is that I liked it.

Overall:

I would have absolutely loved to play this game when I was younger. I missed out when I was a kid! It's got a unique concept. It's fun. Its graphics are good. The story is amusing. The game's a challenge, but it's not too mind numbingly difficult. And for the year it was released (1988) it brought a lot of new ideas to the table, like being able to pick the order you want to play the stages, being able to backtrack to old stages, and being able to select from your inventory the items you wanted to bring to each stage. You can change your weapons. You can walk around and talk to people in the neutral areas. There's so much you can do that you couldn't in your average platformer back then. This game was seriously ahead of its time.

I'm so glad I finally introduced myself to Bionic Commando. It's success stories like this that make my Mop Up Duty review tour so very, very worth it. I may have never played this game otherwise, and it would have been my loss.

THE GRADE:

A-

40th Birthday Mop Up Duty Celebration Tour:

1982 reviews:

1983:

1984: