We’ve had a few encounters with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance over the past year, slicing up guards and watermelons in short, sweet demos. But we knew that blood-filled slicing would work well--it’s Platinum Games, after all--the real test would be how it stands up when we’re allowed to actually play a large chunk of the game. Last week, we were given just that opportunity, and as expected, it was a bloody good time.

What sort of stuff did we cut up? How many pieces did we slice enemies into? We’ve put together a list of some of the coolest things that we saw and did during our time with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to give you an idea of just how fun the game is shaping up to be.

The opening of Rising is a gruesome display of blood tech that pushed our squeamishness limits. During an attack, Raiden lost his arms, took a sword through the chest, and had his eye sliced out. It was brutal.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a bloody, violent mess of a game in which you, in slow-motion, slice and dice other humans into a dozen pieces, and that’s what makes it so great.

This was displayed perfectly during one-on-one battles with armed cyborg guards. After a few sword strikes (to break down their defenses) we were able to use Blade Mode, which let us slow down time for precise chops. It was pure bliss, and we slowly dismembered the guard, taking away limbs one at a time before we finally ended his robolife. It was oddly satisfying.

That’s right, we didn’t just slice up enemies into dozens of pieces, but we actually ripped out their cyborg spines and harvested their power. When we entered Blade Mode and sliced down an enemy’s back vertically, a button prompt appeared. If we timed it right, we’d rip out and crush their spine, using its power to restore both health and blade power meters.

This was incredibly useful in larger combat scenarios, as our health didn’t recharge automatically, leaving us more likely to get killed quickly. If we managed to get two spines free in the same slice, we could even chain them together for a quick harvest.

At the beginning of the second chapter, Raiden takes a trip to Mexico to infiltrate an organ harvesting facility. Unsurprisingly, the only entrance that he can seem to take is by fighting his way through the enemy-filled sewers, because this is a video game, and that’s just how things work.

For a series that has always taken itself so seriously, it was a bit odd to see that we could make Raiden wear a mariachi outfit, complete with a half-poncho that barely covered half of his cyborg body and a comically-sized sombrero. But, yeah, that’s a thing you can do in this game.

There’s no outfit creation, so we were stuck to found costumes, but seeing Raiden in different silly outfits really sold the tone of the game. Nothing says “we’re having fun" better than allowing your main character to wear ridiculous outfits and have no one else say anything about it.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance might be the funniest Metal Gear to date, and not in an ironic way, either. There’s bountiful humor, from Raiden calling out the weirdness of acronyms like DOOMP to a character that continually fails to plug a USB cord in the right way.

It’s the little stuff like this that sets Revengeance apart from past games in the series. Metal Gear has always been funny, but it’s never embraced the insanity of the franchise as much as it does in Revengeance. It manages to ride that fine line between serious and silly just right.

Perhaps the greatest improvement in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is that it manages to keep the cinematic presentation that the series is known for without the need for hour-long cutscenes. The longest cinematic we saw was under 15 minutes, and we were told that they don’t get any longer than that. 15 minutes is still lengthy by non-Metal Gear Solid standards, but it works in Revengeance, keeping the story flowing without constantly pumping the breaks for movie time.

Metal Gear Solid’s long cutscenes were enjoyable, but they kept the series from being accessible to new fans who might not find joy in watching an hour-long documentary about a fake war. Now, with the shorter and less frequent cutscenes, the story flows, and makes it so we can keep our hands on the controller, rather than setting it down and making some popcorn.

While exploring the sewers in Mexico, we stumbled upon a room that had a stack of crates in it. Entering Blade Mode, we started slicing the crates into as many pieces as we could, watching the “pieces" counter in the corner start to add up. After a minute or so of slicing, there was hardly anything left to slice, but it was still counting up. We hacked and slashed until we hit 3,000 pieces--that was enough.

Sadly, it didn’t actually show all 3,000 pieces. After a while, chunks of wood and splinters started to disappear, but it wasn’t that noticeable, and anything that we could still slice stayed around until it wasn’t useful anymore. It became a self-made challenge to see how many pieces we could cut random objects in the environment into.

Speaking of boxes, Platinum Games was sure to sneak a few jokes about past Metal Gear games into Rising, and most of them had to do with Snake’s weird obsession with cardboard. There’s a few boxes scattered throughout levels that resemble the one that Snake used, and sometimes they have people inside of them who pop out when we sliced them.

Raiden usually utters something along the lines of “He’s doing that wrong..." or “What a silly place to hide," clearly poking fun at Snake. He can also hide in a box, but when he moves, it rises to an obvious level above the ground and is easily spotted by enemies who can’t help but wonder what a cardboard box is doing in the middle of an industrial complex.

As if Metal Gear didn’t already house some of the industry’s weirdest enemies, Revengeance takes it to a whole new level with a lady who fights you with an armbar made from actual arms. Fans of the series will note that this isn’t the first time an enemy has used a weapon that exists solely for a pun: It’s all extremely reminiscent of the foe who made a gun out of bees that shot bees in Metal Gear Solid 3.

Once we managed to defeat her, we could purchase and equip the armbar as our secondary weapon. We found it to be extremely effective at attacking enemies from a long distance and setting them up for combos. We’re still having a hard time getting over the fact that we’re beating people to death with a weapon made of arms though.

Dismemberment is key in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, both in terms of success and fun. In an effort to give some weight to the aimless slicing, we needed to cut off the left hands of key members through the game.

For some reason, this is where their information is stored, which makes it vital to discovering new tech and earning upgrades through Doktor, the scientist who put Raiden back together after his incident with Jetstream Sam early on in the game. There’s also times where you’ll need to cut off the hands of commanding officers to gain entrance to certain areas, but that was mostly limited in the time that we spent with it.

Not because they were bad, though, don't get the wrong idea. The Metal Gear series has always been one to test the strength of your gaming abilities, but Revengeance goes even further. This is mostly due to the player’s deeper involvement in the story. Instead of sticking everything behind cutscenes, quicktime events take the reins for some of the larger battle set pieces.

It isn’t out of control with quicktime events, but there are certainly more than you’ll find in your average game. Raiden will get stunned occasionally and the only way to recover is to move the left stick as much as possible. Since this usually happens when we were engaged in combat, it was even more vital to break out of it, often resulting in mashing the control to near-destruction.

Metal Gear has always been about small, intimate encounters. Revengeance, on the other hand, ramps things up quickly, and throws some huge action Raiden’s way regularly--especially in the second chapter when Raiden makes his way to Mexico.

Things started to get bloody as Raiden expressed his rage by killing absolutely everything. We weren’t fighting one or two enemies at a time anymore, but hordes of guards and mechs. It turned into an all-out battle--everybody against Raiden. It finally clicked with us that Revengeance has the potential to be the most exciting Metal Gear to date.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is shaping up to be a real departure from the rest of the series--mostly due to Platinum Games’ influence--and that’s one of the best things that could have happened to it. It’s exciting and funny in a way that no Metal Gear has been before, and you’ll definitely be pleased.