Bayonetta 3 review - a messy melange that just about retains PlatinumGames' magic

Since its inception as part of Osaka studio PlatinumGames' very first wave of games, Bayonetta has been many things - sexy, stylish and most of all brilliantly stupid - but reserved is not one of them. This is an action game in which you press a button and then watch the screen explode in flashes of orgiastic action, where climax is piled atop of climax. It’d be exhausting if it wasn’t quite so exhilarating.

Bayonetta 3 doesn’t change any of that; indeed it’s as bombastic, overstated and over-the-top as this series has ever been, and by extension perhaps the most outrageous thing PlatinumGames has produced yet. It’s also, though, perhaps its most unrefined, because for all its considerable charms Bayonetta 3 is a mess. A charming, frequently dazzling mess, but a mess all the same.

Maybe that’s inevitable in a sequel that throws everything it can at the player, piling on one idea after the other until the whole thing buckles. There’s a story here, but I’m not going to try and make too much sense of it (if you have been keeping up with the Bayonettas, though, you'll be rewarded with face-offs with old favourites and a whole host of cameos I won't spoil here, not least because some incredibly restrictive review guidelines prevent me from doing so). What's important is that there's a multiverse under threat, meaning there are multiple worlds to save and meaning that there's no shortage of new surroundings to tear apart in a series of spectacular setpieces.

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