Bright Memory Infinite review: a beautiful but sometimes clunky walk packed with fun gun-fu technique

If Bright Memory: Infinite for one thing, it’s a blockbuster. It’s a game where at one point you jump and grapple electronically onto a flying plane as it enters a black hole, but it’s also a game where you can easily miss the jump. was poorly illuminated three times in a row and ended with the tagline over the same brief, repeated gunfight.

It’s a short, linear shooter about puzzling high-tech corporate goons and ancient Chinese mythical warriors with bullet and blade wounds – a shooter that both wowed and dazzle, but not without.

The Bright Memory is a mixed bag, but let’s start by crouching down to all the golden clatters among copper. For starters, there’s a basic level of fun that the game can’t really drop below if they let me deflect projectiles with a sword. This is not one of the best examples of that (I mean it doesn’t Samurai Gunn), but it might be the prettiest. You can block for an extended period of time, spray golden reflections across the screen as you rush to kill a katana, or just get up for a few moments needed for your health to be restored. Precise timing only matters when your enemies are close and personal, or against scepters, riot shields, and giant axes that need to be blocked before their wielder is vulnerable to normal attacks.

There’s a rhythm to it, as you’d hope. Swords collide with segue into shotgun blasts, chain launchers into sprints, chain sprints into rocket explosions. Some of these moves are unlockable and upgradeable, with new toys arriving at breakneck speed. Within 20 minutes, you’ll have a sword that can decapitate a small dog from ten feet away, and within 40 minutes, you’ll be jumping into the air with a massive mass above the ground. Those same upgrade points can also be used to boost alternate fire modes for each of your four guns, though those tend to do more simple damage and AOE buffs.

Battles draw comparisons to Devil May Cry, and for good reason – there’s a playing field for it where, at least on the standard “violent” difficulty level, battles aren’t duels fight to survive and more about striving to look stylish. Sure, hammering your blade slash can be the safest and most effective way to cut a field of soldiers, but why do it when you can use a wrist-mounted tractor beam to drag a helpless person in front of you before unleashing an EMP explosion that disintegrates everything in front of you in a little blue apocalypse? I wish developer Zeng Xiancheng (impressively, mostly solo) had leaned in that direction a bit more strongly, in fact, with a style combo meter that offers a bonus for variety beyond my inner voice ‘so cool’.

The style meter will also have a huge advantage of puncturing some of the Bright Memory’s serious character. There’s little to the story – you’re barely introduced to the heroine before your shoes hit the rain-soaked ground to investigate weather anomalies for your enigmatic boss. It is best understood as a sort of moody vignette, complete with a gore from an evil corporation who has less personality than he is facial expressions. When the giant ancient demonic warriors appeared, they were barely commented on. The story is sporadic and slick, though in a way that leads to some standout design pieces like those airplane freaks I mentioned in the intro. This is a world made for the sake of doing great things with swords and it shows, but in the end you can just shrug it off and move on, and it’s incredibly well-suited to pseudo-justifications. COD’s despicable creation of torture and war crimes.

However, there’s a reason I only use the word ‘texture’: the whole game only lasts about two hours. Every moment of it is beautiful, especially if your PC can handle a fancy ray-tracing point, but every moment is more or less the same. You’re always moving through more or less the same environment, pushing flooded and windy villages through with a black hole looming over your horizon. It’s a look, but it’s just a look, and then it’s over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In a world where games are often unwelcome, it’s refreshing to play a game where the credits roll as soon as it starts repeating itself. The feeling of combat is varied, but not endless. Brutal soldiers are truly satisfying in nature, but the freshness of the battles still relies on your enthusiasm to try the new exciting move you’ve just unlocked. It’s a wise choice to remove those people generously, when most games will take them out of all-too-familiar encounters. Here, I dived straight into the depths of a healthy upgrade pool and finished just as I was scratching to the bottom. That said, the ending still feels abrupt, and it’s worth knowing two hours or so is all you pay – nor will those two hours always be good.

When I got to the end, one of my first thoughts was relief that there was no longer any danger of having to stumble into another lousy, ‘dark and implied death’ classical school upon discovering the stealth part. It turns out that only one of them, although verbose in part, also commits malice and at the same time takes away all your powers because of electromagnetic ugh. Moving between battles also doesn’t feel as smooth as the battle itself, with wall run and overlay animations often clicking into place awkwardly.

It’s gorgeous, and the gun-fu tech band feels cracked, for a while – but elsewhere, Bright Memory: Infinite is uneven and hammy. Like a home-cooked sausage roll baked with love rather than skill. You are here for a good time, not a long one, or even a real phenomenon. Like I said, this is not Samurai Gunn. A more useful comparison of genre would be Cut-off steel – a recent and proper acrobatic gun ballet, harmoniously combining showiness, slow-motion bullet dodging and coherent artistic vision. In contrast, BMI can look very confusing.

However, it’s not fair to judge a game solely through the lens of a masterpiece. The peaks you can reach with Severed Steel don’t make the hills of BMI worth the climb, and it’s still an impressive creation that comes from one man’s work. A short burst of high fidelity might be just what you’re after, and this hits the level of spectacle you’d normally expect from a much larger group with a much larger budget.