Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the initial release of Platinum Games’ brilliant Bayonetta and Vanquish, Sega recently released brand new ports of these key titles for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Developed by Armature and seemingly based on the existing PC ports, we now have the best possible console versions of these titles – but there remains the lingering sense that the conversion work itself is somewhat unambitious.
Priced at either £19.99/$24.99 per game or bundled together for £34.99/$39.99, the good news is that you’re getting a pretty good deal here – and we’d definitely recommending picking up the bundle. These titles represent Platinum at the zenith of their powers during the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era and it’s only a shame that similar conversions of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance aren’t available too.
Starting with Bayonetta, Platinum’s brilliant action game plays out beautifully on all systems. Back in the day, users had the choice between an excellent Xbox 360 version (marred only by intrusive screen-tearing) and the frankly abject PlayStation 3 interpretation, produced by a third party for publisher Sega. In a sense then, the new PS4 port is redemption: the game plays out locked at 60 frames per second at a native 1080p resolution.
Back in the day, we noted that the PC port of Bayonetta could run at 1080p60 even on low-power GPUs such as the Radeon HD 7770 1GB, so with that in mind it comes as no surprise to see that Xbox One also delivers the same nigh-on flawless 1080p60 presentation as its PlayStation 4 counterpart, the only difference being what looks like a variance in the gamma curve with Xbox One considerably darker in tone. Interestingly, in this respect, it’s an absolute match for the original Xbox 360 game.
The PC version of Bayonetta offered up some additional options including very subtle ambient occlusion and support for multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) but these features were never included in the original Xbox 360 title and they aren’t included in the new console ports either. The artwork still holds up though and the overall experience is terrific on both platforms – but there is the sense that the turnout on the enhanced consoles is somewhat underwhelming.