Konami’s Metal Gear games are widely admired for their consistently incredible graphics and genre-defining stealth action gameplay—neither of which have officially appeared on the Mac for years. So TransGaming’s release of Metal Gear Rising – Revengeance ($30) is noteworthy for its very existence as a Mac game: originally a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 title, this side story stars the increasingly popular cyborg ninja Raiden, whose initially groan-inducing debut in Metal Gear Solid 2 has been all but forgotten due to subsequent titles like this. Set after Metal Gear Solid 4, Revengeance is an action-heavy title where a katana-wielding Raiden runs through fully destructable 3-D environments, slashing through whatever and whomever he encounters. Your ability to “cut anything, anytime, anywhere” lets you create and destroy paths through the levels, as well as dispatching collections of villains as easily as slicing vegetables. Stealth is less important here than constantly swinging the sword to gather parts and points from enemies, then upgrading Raiden’s gear.
While Revengeance demands a fairly well-equipped Mac to run—4GB RAM, 27GB of hard drive space, and a video card with 512MB of memory—the requirements aren’t as exacting as might be imagined. Macs with Intel Iris GPUs will work, as will any video card better than an AMD HD4870 or NVIDIA 650M, which is to say that several-year-old machines should work, with 8GB machines and 1GB video cards “recommended” for superior performance. You’ll probably want to supply an Xbox 360/One or Sony DualShock 3/4 controller—the game supports them all, as well as Logitech’s Dual Action—in order to really use Raiden’s legs and sword-swinging ability at the same time. Metal Gear Rising – Revengeance is currently being sold through both the Mac App Store and Steam, initially at a $5 discount off of the regular $30 asking price.