I had my reservations about the game after reading the information on the gaming sites, and seeing the gameplay footage, but after the demo on xboxlive, I was leaning towards not purchasing the game until I could get some unbiased reviews from gamers ( the forums are the best place considering it's fanboy heaven. After seeing the review on xplay last night, I crossed Bionic Commando off of my must have list.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to have gold live memberships, the Bionic Commando multi-player demo hit last week. The demo has no training for you to get accustomed to the controls so your thrust into the fray blindly. The layout is generic to say the least, there is no lobby settings (which probably will be changed for the full version. you get put into a lobby, where you are forced to wait as long as it takes to get 8 people to join, this can take some time depending on how impatient the players are who jump in, and jump out. There is only one map available to play, it is a night time map set ontop of 3 buildings set in triangular formation, there are health boosts as well as armour pickups around the map which is bottomless I think, the map is so dark, it's no wonder the developers made the online characters neon colored pink, orange, blue, green, yellow and so on. It's easier to see your opponents than it is to see most of the map. You would think that is a good thing, but really there is no advantage to being able to see your opponent from across the map. For one, the map isn't that large, for each building, and landing there are weapon spawn locations, here lies the problem, the person who spawns closest to the sniper rifle, or machine gun (the long range weapons in the game) have no need to move, they can grab the weapon, and just sit there while the people who spawn near the shotgun and grenade launcher have to travel to get their kills, and die in the process. At first, I was wondering what it was I was doing wrong, why was I dying so much? Why wasn't I getting any kills. When I realized a minute or so into a match that i had been killed 4 times by 2 other players who when i respawned and got up high were still in their locations.... guess where.... camping by the machine gun, and sniper rifle. By the end of the match those 2 were in the lead, i was only able to kill the guy who kept spawning near the shotgun. The weapon locations don't change, where you spawn does. This may have been a tug of war between the developers, but the winning team was wrong, change the weapon locations instead of player locations. The map isn't large enough for you to forget where the weapons are, and if your unlucky enough to not spawn near  one of the ranged weapons, you have to waste time, and possibly a life to get said wapons, or a kill. It's an okay game mode, but it feels really tacked on, and not well thought out. The maps really need to be larger if camping is a designed key component. If your going to try the demo, bring your graham craakers, marshmellows, and chocolate, 'cause there's a whole lot of camping going on.