Bionic Commando is good when …

• you’re swinging around like a metal Tarzan.
• you pick up a new weapon or “recall” a new skill and the game challenges you to kill a bunch of dudes with it.
• you’re racking up achievements based on those challenges like every five minutes.

Bionic Commando is very, very bad when …

• you swing your metal Tarzan into an area your not supposed to and he dies pretty much instantly from radiation poisoning.
• your metal Tarzan is resurrected like way back, before that ridiculous swinging sequence, before that battle against those three biomechs, before you gathered those three collectables and BEFORE you completed that pretty tough challenge.

I wouldn’t pay money for Bionic Commando* in any case, but it would have been a pretty decent third-person swinger/shooter if not for too-frequent deaths and too-infrequent checkpoints. Someone with less patience and a weaker collection compulsion would have snapped the disc in half and mailed the shards back to Capcom by the middle of the second chapter. Save yourself the apoplexy and play BC: Rearmed 1 vs. 100 instead.

*Thanks to Gig pal Tony for lending it to me.