Bayonetta wins for me

At least in Bayonetta I am able to pick a difficulty that I want to plqay on right now. Like coming for instance coming back to it after a a few years I can play on normal and enjoy it.

NG/NG2 have only one difficulty - frustrating right from the beginning and cheap bosses.

Bayonetta wins for me.

Bayonetta has different difficulty levels that allow you to get accustomed to battle system and enemy move set while still letting you enjoy the game. NG2 even on easy setting is just insane difficulty from get go making it frusturating experience. If you stick with it for 5+ hours while continuously retrying same checkpoints/levels learning it becomes enjoyable till next cheap boss which in NG2 is a trait of all bosses. I think it took me 2-3 years to finally getting around beating NG2 and I have no intention playing it again. While in Bayonetta I've done almost all challenges mastered game on all difficulties and played through DMC/DMC4 on all difficulties. Not to mention NG2 move set is very small compare to Bayonetta arsenal.

you keep all of the collected upgrades in NG+

The side missions do reset however so you should all of those in one game 

Well after just finishing the game's final 14th chapter in about 10 hours I've got to say I am pleased and disappointed at the same time.

Being die hard fan of both previous titles I am pleased to see 3rd game and also pleased that the gameplay is mostly unchanged. This is the good.
In some places however it felt as if developer were forcing me to use cover and with that Gears of War style of gameplay which in my opinion does not belong in this franchise at all. The prime example of that is the end boss fight. Also the little twirks like ability to accidentally bullet dodge off the rooftops and docks to death was really not something I enjoyed. I also was disappointed by the lack of tutorial as having not played Max Payne for years and playing it last with mouse a keyboard a tutorial would have been a welcome addition as it took me about an hour or more to understand the new mechanics and that shoot dodge was kind off worthless comparing run and gun bullet time in MP3. Also a big distraction for me was the revival chance that automatically activates upon player running out of hp while carrying painkillers. If this happens layer is given a chance to 1 bullet KO anything that got the kill shot while automatically activating bullet time. This this imo is a disaster as many times NPCs would be behind cover and unreachable or shooting Max in the back and not allowing him to shoot them while waisting 15-20 seconds hanging in the slow death ... also while this is happening restart checkpoint option is disabled ... It also feels very distracting even if I manage to kill my would be assassin as that same enemy may not have died from my previous 2-3 shots to the head but now is dead from a shot to a knee cap or arm.
All in all the gameplay is solid but from memory worse than comparing it with MP2 due to listed above changes as I was no longer able to do crazy shoot dodge/roll and all sort of crazy gunplay that I was looking forward to due imo the fact that executing bullet dodge leaves Max very vulnerable making me use mostly run and gun bullet time which is not as cool. Also I was upset by NPCs unnatural sniper like accuracy with all of the weapons including shotgun at long distances as well as by ninja reflexes that allowed them to fire the instant I may have turned corner without leaving any time for me to react.

Now I'd like to talk about story. Since I do not want to spoil anything I am going to just say the story itself is solid as is voice acting. I do however have a major problem with story presentation which is 100% done through ingame cutscenes. I am not epileptic but the path the artistic direction chose here made me feel like I was while viewing these. This is due to the following - the camera is always unsteady giving scene armature/mobilephone filming effect while this is going on the are happening unknown random color flashes/acid burns of most Maxes image in the scene and on top of that if there is any dialogue there ARE BOLD LETTERS COMING OUT OF SOME PLACE IN THE SCENE like from behind the desk reiterating the last phrase that was said. If that wasnt enough there are often picture in picture effects. And at least but not least ( I dont know if this is another special effect or not but ) during the cutscense the frame rate seems to be less than 10 fps making most of the cutscenes look absolutely horrible.

To summarize this is a solid game but being Max Payne fan I was left disappointed that this title did not leave me in awe as did both previous titles. I guess the best reflection would be that after I was done beating the game I do not have any desire to play the game some more once is enough. This is a solid one time title for me unlike MP1,and MP2 wich I've beaten at least 3-4 times each.

no they can not be customised. There are 3-4 presets