PC Port Report: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

A lesson in listening

Hey everyone! There’s a Platinum Games game out on PC! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?! Well, I guess since this is their first foray into the world of PC ports, it’s probably a good idea to check and see how well they’ve done.

Other companies haven’t done so well in their PC debut, largely due to a complete misunderstanding of the market and lack of continued support. Luckily, Konami and Platinum Games know the value in patches, and have addressed some of the issues in Metal Gear Rising.

Metal  Gear Rising: Revengeance (PC tested], PS3, Xbox 360)
Developer: Platinum Games
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment
MSRP: $29.99
Release Date: January 9, 2014
Rig: Intel i7-4770k 3.50 GHz, 8GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU 

I’ll start with the best news of all about this PC port: the team is listening. When the game launched, it required an online connection to Steam in order to actually play; playing offline was impossible. However, Konami is actually paying attention and has already fixed the issue. With any PC port, an attentive team behind the game is critical. Too often do games get a terrible port only to also be ignored after the initial release. If they’re paying attention, any number of further issues could be addressed!

When booting the game up, be ready for some unskippable splash screens of company logos. As of yet, there isn’t even a sneaky edit-the-files way of getting around this, which is a bummer. After that, diving into the video options screen yields some decent results. There are some missing resolution sizes, and for whatever reasons my native desktop resolution simply does not work with Revengeance, forcing me to play at a lower resolution.

If you change the display to one that can’t be displayed, the game won’t automatically go back after 15 seconds or so, like most resolution changes. Mashing the escape key will eventually reset the settings, though. Texture filtering, antialiasing, blur, and more can all be customized in the options menu. There is not, however, an option to play in a borderless window or to alter the FOV.

The controls can be almost completely remapped, as the game does not accept extra mouse buttons (mouse 4+) as valid inputs. Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn’t bad, though performing the slow-motion slices, where the angle can be adjusted with each slice, is very awkward when using a mouse. The game also has negative mouse acceleration, which means that very small mouse movements will simply be ignored by the game. The game also supports Xbox 360 controllers perfectly fine, though other controllers will require a third party program to use and the button prompts will not be changed on-screen.

The game looks great, especially in motion. With the graphics pushed up, everything is just lovely. In-game, Revengeance runs at a constant 60 frames per second. Seeing as the game moves incredibly quickly at times, the solid graphics and great framerate make Revengeance a wonderfully visual experience.

Considering that the PC version also comes with all three pieces of DLC and Raiden costumes, it’s hard to argue against this port. Sure, it isn’t perfect, with a glaring omission or two and it lacks a handful of niceties, but it has something that many PC ports don’t have — a team that fixes stuff, opening up the door to more potential fixes in the future. It plays very well on a keyboard and mouse or an Xbox gamepad, so take up your weapon of choice and get slicin’.