Bayonetta is a frenetic key-masher, one great big sore thumbs-up frantic and frankly barking fightfest. Hack ’n’ slash ’n’ kick-ass combat games get reeled out like programmes with Simon Cowell in them, so they have to be damn good to have that E=mc2 Factor. Bayonetta has it. The Einsteins behind this offering are designers Platinum Games and with Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry, Okami) at the helm, these people are serious. They’ve taken some of the core elements of fight games, tweaked, honed and polished ’em into one of the smoothest combat systems you’ll ever get your mitts on and enveloped it in a visually stunn­ing battlescape in which, thankfully, no one told them: you can’t do that. They can and they do.

Aeons of battling between the forces of light and darkness have seen the Lumen Sages of light aligned with the god of Paradiso and the Umbran Witches of darkness all cosy with the demons of Inferno, balancing up the cosmic Yin and Yang in their fractious twoness. After an apocalyptic war, only one Umbran Witch remains: badass amnesiac Bayonetta, waking centuries later in Vigrid city (its three distinct milieux modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, no less). After bloody, bespectacled encounters with angels to even out the cosmic imbalance, exchanging coll­ected pages of ancient records for weapon upgrades at the gates of Hell along the way, Bayonetta’s past is gradually revealed. If that hasn’t caused a headache, the boss battles will: they make Legolas riding and downing the Oliphant in Lord of the Rings seem like a toddler tickling a papier-mâché piñata.

Unabashedly, Bayonetta herself has every geeky wish fulfilment attribute imaginable: a willowy-limbed female assassin with clothing seemingly spray-painted on. She’s a double-gun-toting, spectacles-wearing super siren, sporting mini machine-pistol stilettos to boot. She gives a whole new meaning to the phrase bad hair day, because that seemingly spray-painted attire is her hair, magically unfurling whirlwind-like to reveal Bayonetta in all her (anything but) badass birthday glory when you reel off those combo moves. You can’t do that. Thankfully they do.

The playable Prologue takes you through key mashing moves that are elaborated upon with a ‘halo’ system of rewards as you play in-game, unlocking even more balletic, bone-crushing combin­ations, mixing it up in a leaping, tossing, roundhousing kaleido­scopic martial arts cocktail of moves with the aid of trinkets like the Climax Bracelet.

With about 15 hours of finger-flicking goodness, Bayonetta’s replay value is much higher on harder settings, for which you have to become a combo moves master. Given it contains one of the slickest combat systems packed into a pad, it has bags of appeal for casual and hardcore gamers alike. Xbox 360 is the platform of preference. The designers had nothing to do with the ported PS3 version and don’t even consider it the same game. Like I said: these guys are serious!