As a flat out action game in the vein of the similarly sublime Devil May Cry (designed by the same guy, as it happens), on the other hand, Bayonetta is easily up to snuff with such action-intensive extravaganzas - it even exceeds said forbear in terms of deliciously malicious things to kill per second.
However, Bayonetta is wrapped in so much hallucinogenic adolescent fantasy - unabashed crotch shots, heaving boobies, hideously long legged, big booty, pea-headed garishness, magically momentary strip-teased glimpse of lingerie whilst clothing whips off to form a magical monster of some sort, Freudian mommy-was-a-pole-dancing lollipop-sucking degenerate, laughably nauseating dialogue and maladjusted innuendo - that you probably won't want to admit enjoying the game as a whole. Alternatively, if you do admit it, you'll also be wearing your stunted adolescence on your sleeve. Good on ya.
That said, you'd never deny the awesomeness of the actual action at hand. After all its insult to intellect, Bayonetta is nonetheless a glorious assault on the senses. It takes bedeviling surrealism to preposterously outlandish extremes. It offers up a madcap mire of Goth meets S&M meets steampunk meets Wiccan Goodfellas meets The Revelation of Saint John the Divine read backward and delivers it all with a dizzyingly skewered sense of scale.
The narcissistic, oversexed Bayonetta herself, a rampaging witch with centerfold aspirations, is right at home in this realm of religiously twisted architecture and demented angels cum cherubic demons all hopped up on performance enhancing manna. Dual-wielding weapons on her feet as well as both hands (so, like, quadruple-wielding), she's a sadistic witch taking great pleasure in defiling both hero and anti-hero conventions by just running amok, throwing all she surveys into slow-motion at opportune times for some unmitigated torture to finish foes, sometimes conjuring some nasty contraption for just that purpose. Oh, and collecting halos and baubles to upgrade her assorted skills and sundries. It's that weird, that maniacal, that shameless a guilty pleasure.
With the dial set on easy, there's not much more than a single-button needed to set Bayonetta to the steady stream of tasks at hand (and feet, as it were). Harder settings crank up the challenge/satisfaction ratio, though no setting can hide the redundancy of it all - the relentless mayhem takes care of that. Play it in one or two hour spurts and it's just fantastically frenetic fun... just leave your reason, intellect and gag reflex at the door.
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