Metal Gear Solid: Revengeance is a beat`em-up spin off of its tactical stealth parent franchise.

It both pleasantly surprised and disappointed me at the same time. For starters, despite being an action game, it still has a fairly well-written, albeit cheesy, story concentrating on modern war politics and advancing technology. Codec conversations with your weapon scientist are particularly mind-blowing, at times reaching the hardness of sci-fi comparable to that of Arthur C. Clarke. On the other hand, the action game-play, while fascinating from the first glance, uses such an alien control scheme and does such a poor job at explaining itself that at times it feels the game is downright unplayable on higher difficulties. I still can`t believe they thought it was a good idea to make attack and block commands respond to the same button; not to mention that dodge command is an easy-to-miss unlockable. Anyway, while boss fights are flashy and very well designed, the battles with trash mobs are usually more tedious and frustrating than they are fun.