perfectly imperfect. it's not my intention to unleash Gamer Mode but this game's profile, for me, was really heightened due to three separate yet interrelated factors: the addition of a crisp 60FPS included in the ported edition, opting for the mostly well-tuned hard difficulty, and playing on a controller that isn't the dualshock 3. these components were tangible right from the start and coalesced to create the kind of flow state vanquish so often strives for very early-on in the experience.

it's kind of a misunderstood game sometimes, even by its supporters. rabble rousers who didn't engage with the mechanics will tell you it's a generic third person shooter, but they wouldn't exactly be wrong; what makes the cogs in vanquish roar to life has far more to do with the speed of the title as you boost slide from cover to cover and intelligently utilize your suit's reactive time-slowdown to dispatch droves of robots. getting to that level of play can be difficult for first-timers who either approach it as they would any other unseasoned third-person shooter or attempt to play it with the community-ascribed mechanical gravitas burdening their playstyle, when in reality, the optimal way to play is a mix of both approaches. and when these efforts work, they really do shine brilliantly. there's a certain level of madness here not seen in other third person shooters that i'm sure i'd somehow enjoy even more if i had the chance to play on pc and could use the suits timing to kill more than 3 or 4 bots at a time, something closely resembling a high-octane max payne. fluency promotes fluidity which leads to battleground dominance, and there's enough light weapons experimentation and tactical play stringing the replayable experience along to make the game worth the first run and then some. it's at its best in these sterile futuristic halls as you vault over cover, wipe the floor with three enemies, then in one gambit slide around a romanov to fire a shotgun shell into his achilles heel before delivering a coup de grace with your melee. sam gideon's the most unassuming middle-aged looking guy but you trap him in that gear and he'll have the combat expertise and battle readiness of any other platinum protagonist. you ever seen those first videos of tom brady at the NFL scouting combine where he just looks utterly pathetic running drills? same deal. that's football quarterbacks for ya

it's the melee system here that is one of the most questionable mechanics on offer, so i want to pivot a bit more here to where vanquish fails to deliver, because in so many ways this titles in dire need of a sequel it will never receive. many have pointed out that the melees in this title detract from experimentation because completely depleting your resources seems too harsh a penalty, and i would agree despite what i think the intention might be (i.e. your melee as a desperation move - completely rote). what's more interesting to me is that this highlights a meaningful failure to synergize melee and gunplay together into a cohesive whole from the person who directed resident evil 4. there are shades of what this game could and should have been when you come to learn that sliding melees, when utilized on terrain like cover or walls, will give you enough airtime to fire a few slugs into mechanical skulls at no cost, but these are negligible in the grand scheme of things. considering how many CQC techniques sam uses in the cutscenes this is a bit of a missed opportunity to create some really fun opportunities for combat experimentation. it didn't need to be about space control ala RE4, but it should have been incorporated into the movement as well and i think melee techniques designed to keep momentum going operating in tandem with melee techniques that are about halting momentum to safely deal massive damage could have been a step in the preferable direction

instead we have a repertoire of weapons meant to facilitate said experimentation, which is fine save for two things: the situational tendencies of your armory and the abysmal weapon ranking system. i see no reason to delve too deeply into the first other than to say the assault rifle and the shotgun are consistently two of your best weapons and that you'll probably want the rocket launcher for a bit whenever it comes up. the real problem here is the knowledge that in order to upgrade a weapon, you'll need to either hope an enemy drops an upgrade chip or you'll need to conserve that weapon's ammo entirely and hope you can find an equivalent pickup. for instance, to upgrade an assault rifle, i'd want to not use the assault rifle so i can hopefully, by the grace of god, find three more ammo pickups to slot in an upgrade necessary to make the weapon perform. just utterly baffling, made slightly worse by a strange checkpoint system which punishes these rankings upon death, which conceptually makes sense but given that these aren't meaningfully tied to the (also not good) scoring system they're hardly a galvanizing incentive for players to achieve mastery, either. ironically this whole bit is made worse in the remaster where i quickly learned that, thanks to better load times, instead of using a checkpoint that would reset my ranking, i could simply go to the title screen on a game over and reload my save for a few extra seconds without suffering any debilitations, which further hampers an already dull and arbitrary scoring system

the last point to be made here is just that this game's full of conceptual detritus. i've warmed up a bit more to the premise and tone of the title but it occupies a strange nexus between platinums over the top sensibility and sledgehammer satire (ala madworld) and a westernized gears of war-esque romp. you could liken this narrative approach to something not too dissimilar from metal gear but given the high concept behind the playable supersoldier in question it would have been nice to have something that made a bit more of an aesthetic splash. it's a surprisingly drab game without a lot of memorable hooks beyond the mechanics. making something that was a bit more like neo-human casshern in its flavoring would probably have made this game stood out a bit more, for me, but i think the direction the game went for makes sense considering the context of its development. this game's already as westernized as it can be and you had braingeniuses like arthur gies say, and i quote, "it's repetitive, clunky, and irritatingly punitive. very japanese." how do you get past consumers like that

anyways yet another feather in the hat for the general rule of thumb: the best third-person shooters have 'shinji mikami' somewhere in the credits. sasuga platinum

(edit for posteritys sake: im gonna be chipping away at learning god hard difficulty on my lonesome and i expect some of this review may be untrue by the end, at least with regards to ranking and armory)

If Vanquish lasted about half its actual runtime it might honestly have gotten an 8 or a 9 from me, unfortunately it does not. The great first half in which you get to grips with the boosting and slow mo abilities and their synergies embody the old adage "easy to learn, hard to master" and rewards good play with, well not having to play a cover shooter basically.

I really don't like cover shooters, I find them to be the definition of tedium as you pop in and out of cover, the challenge being more a test of your patience as you wait for your regenerating health to refill. So far Deus Ex HR is the only one ive ever enjoyed much, even Kane And Lynch 2 whose aesthetics I sort of enjoyed had utterly mind numbing gameplay for the most part.

The genius of Vanquish is that its a cover shooter only if you're bad at the game. You can play Vanquish as gears of war but the various mobility and bullet time abilities mean ideally you will never be behind cover if you can manage them without overheating your suit's regenerating energy bar. These are a joy to get to grips with and whilst I am fairly shit at this game (on normal) it was easy enough to achieve some mastery that on later levels I was barely ever in cover. And I know because the game keeps track of that stat.

Typical for Platinum games, the game scores you on various parameters though unlike Bayonetta or the like you don't get Graded, just a score which is a bit harder to grasp. I however like this system because I always find being graded, usually poorly in these games on a first runthrough to be kind of demoralising. I know its supposed to make me want to try for a higher score on a second playthrough but it just feels like a slap to the face to finish a level with some effort and get a D for your trouble.

The story of Vanquish is dumb, but not dumb enough to be funny. You play as a DARPA engineer whos tagging along with Scottish Poet Robert Burns in order to stop Mecha Putin from blowing up New York with an orbital laser. Now the scottish poet line is a joke in theory but there's an achievement called For Auld Lang Syne so maybe he WAS actually named after the poet? The main character's voice acting is also slightly annoying.

I don't really have all that much insight as to why the game falls off, its mostly just repetition, annoying and boring sections for the most part. Its also when the freshness of the mechanics had worn off and my skills hit a plateau; not that the game was particularly hard on normal difficulty. The boss fights are mostly bad and tedious and the later levels have way too many bullet spongy enemies, even when you maneuver yourself to hit their glowing weakspot I had to unload way too many bullets from max upgraded weapons to down the big fuckers.

I know a lot of the fun in Platinum games is playing it again but trying for higher scores or difficulty modes but nah, I'm good game.

Also SPOILERS I guess but as soon as I met with Robert Burns I literally said to myself "well he's going to be a boss later" and lo and behold who do you fight near the climax. The only semi clever thing about the story is that after you kill the final boss it turns out it was a remote controlled robot and not actually Mecha Putin but you flee the exploding station. You then get an achivevement called "the End of Major Combat Operations". Then "Not Hillary Clinton" kills herself and Mecha Putin implies sequel hook. Now maybe this is me giving the game too much credit but that phrase was used by George W Bush in his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Lincoln after the initial invasion of Iraq : "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed" Of course as we all know, that was not the end of it and indeed the US would keep fighting an insurgency in Iraq for years. This implies of course that the "War has only just begun" despite our fight in this first game being done. IDK it just jumped out of me when I saw that.

Vanquish is an over the top, silly, action packed, Sci-Fi, third person shooter, directed by Shinji Mikami, that seems like a response to the stop and pop, waist high cover based, third person shooters of it’s time. So it should be an absolute winner and the type of game I’m going to love and it mostly is. However, Vanquish is a bit underwhelming in some ways and has a few flaws too that keep it from being everything it could be.

Vanquish is somewhat comparable to those lovable 80s and early 90s American action films and it is also a very videogame-y videogame. But for something with this kind of vibe it can be unexpectedly bland. Where’s the personality, the charm, the charisma, the style, the camp? Okay maybe I’ve started off a little too harsh here. It does have its charm and is a bit cool. It is likable and excessive. I like the characters and the way they talk. I like that the main character, Sam, smokes as much as he can and it’s used in gameplay too. The game isn’t really short on crazy moments; it opens with San Francisco getting micro waved from space. There’s one instant when Sam say’s ‘this is like a videogame’ and the tutorial includes a bit about how you can’t jump in just because you’ve read the manual. It’s got something and is fun, but after Resident Evil 4, God Hand and Platinum’s other game Bayonetta this just doesn’t compare and it feels a little bit more flat than it should be.

This can be seen in the games visuals that are a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand I think Sam’s Augmented Reaction Suit looks great and so does the BLADE system, which is a transforming weapon that can change into three different currently ‘held’ weapons. Sam looks awesome in motion too. Boosting around, flying out cover and how he melee attacks was really well done. Slow motion is excellent looking as well and I need to give a special mention to the grenade throws. The fantastic animation is helped by good sound effects too. I think the robot enemies look pretty good and some of the characters like the villain, Victor, the Lieutenant Colonel Robert Burns, who you often fight alongside, and your assisting character, Elena, get good enough character designs. Along the way you’ll see some nice views and a real highlight of the game is that it is set in what is essentially a cylinder floating in space, so when you look off in the distance the environments curve up and go above you. There are some really cool action sequences in cut scenes and the action during gameplay is the right kind of visually hectic. Vanquish has nailed the most important visual aspects for a game like this and the performance too.

On the other hand this world and the levels can be kind of uninspired. The places you move through are forgettable and blur into each other in your mind at least up until act 3, or maybe act 4 in particular, but this is only a 5 act long game. There’s a lot of bland looking space marine dudes running about and just a lot of ‘okay’ looking stuff. Plenty of the cut scenes have over the top action which is great but the way it is framed often isn’t. The camera likes to move a lot, often having that shaky hand held technique and there are times with lots of quick cuts and zooms. I know what they were going for but I don’t like it, I prefer to see action clearly, in all its glory. I guess they were maybe inspired by Hollywood at the time, in that post Jason Bourne, Transformers era. I wasn’t a fan and think later scenes in the game that focus on Sam in action work better. There is some level of deliberately being bad going in this game as it is aiming for a dumb American action movie, mixed with a Japanese developer’s style, kind of aesthetic and mood. Perhaps there’s a reason why this is focused on what truly counts in a game like this though.

Vanquish is about some Russian bad guys taking over a giant American space cylinder colony, that has a giant microwave gun on it. The Russians use it to wipe out San Francisco and then threaten New York next. America doesn’t surrender, they send in space marines and Sam from DARPA also gets sent in, with his fancy battle suit, and a special mission to rescue a Doctor. It’s simple, a bit of fun and gives you reasons to do a whole lot of shooting. Unfortunately though it’s not very good or interesting or fleshed out, even if there are some bits of info dropped in loading screens, and you’ll probably figure out the reveals/twists before they come. The characters are definitely action game/movie characters but they are fun to watch. I particularly liked the dialogue and dynamic between Sam and Burns. There are some well known voice actors here like Gideon Emery, Steve Blum and Kari Wahlgren and they deliver lines just as you’d want them to for a game like this. The music is fine too but not much stood out to me. The game ends really abruptly and feels like there should have been another hour or two or more likely a sequel that we never got. It’s quite a short game and feels short, with the last two acts in a five act game going by much quicker than the previous three acts. Overall I just don’t have much interest in re-watching the cut scenes or going through the non gameplay moments of this game again. Maybe there is a reason, beyond just time and budget constraints, for this purity, simplicity, focus and short run time. Maybe everything is done (or not done) to service the gameplay; the fun, fast paced, action packed, very re-playable, reason that you’re actually here, gameplay.

Vanquish is a third person cover shooter that doesn’t want you in cover playing it like a cover shooter. It’s about speed and movement and what happens when you’re not in cover. If you play this game like a normal cover shooter you will probably come away from the game feeling dissatisfied and I’m not even sure if this would be that viable on harder difficulties, so get out of cover and get into it (not that I’m saying you should always be out of cover). You have a boost knee slide to rocket around the battlefield, to flank or get behind enemies. You have a dodge roll and you can use it as much as you need. There’s a good variety of weapons at your disposal and it’s enjoyable to mess around with all of them. The weapons upgrade in an interesting way too, that you need to learn to work with. They upgrade by picking up more of the same fully stocked weapon you have, and some random upgrade drops, but if you die the upgrades drop back down a bit. Added to this is the ability to heal injured Marines fighting along with you for more weapon drops. Sam can go into Augmented Reaction mode (slow mo) to kill multiple enemies quickly with accurate shots, to get in quick heavy amounts of damage, to shoot rockets out the air and to move around the bullets slowly ripping by. The slow mo also activates when you take a bunch of damage too so you have a chance to save your arse. You can do really cool melee attacks, that vary based on the weapon you have equipped, and do good damage but leave you vulnerable. Which leads to how energy is done in this game; the boost, slow mo, melee and health all share a pool. So you have to balance things while still being aggressive. Something else that needs a quick mention is how well Platinum usually does difficulty. Vanquish is both accessible and not short on challenge. You can choose the easier modes or normal depending on what you’re comfortable with and have fun. Then there is Hard, God Hard and challenges for the challenge seekers and those looking for depth will find it.

Vanquish works really well and the elements of its gameplay come together to create something special. Reading my brief description you can probably already guess this is about risk/reward. The joy of Vanquish comes from playing on the edge. The line between being an unstoppable force on the battlefield and dying or being forced to cower in cover is small. The other thing that is so enjoyable is learning to play and diving into these simple mechanics to discover the depth here. When you play Vanquish you should mess around with it, have fun and get creative. See what you can pull off and then try to link that stuff together so you can get into a very cool looking and feeling flow. It doesn’t matter if you die a lot for while and don’t let this stop, frustrate or worry you. Vanquish isn’t about just getting through it and seeing the story. It’s a videogame with a capital V. So get into it and ‘play.’ Leap over cover and trigger slow mo in the air and rain down bullets on the robots trying to hide. Boost dodge your way through the chaos. Throw a grenade into a pack off enemies but use slow mo to shoot your own grenade in the air when it’s right above them. Boost slide melee attack into an enemy and then trigger slow mo in the air off this and use the sniper rifle to hit an enemy in the distance that thought they were safe. Jump into cover when you need a reprieve and take a ciggy break then watch as Sam flicks the cigarette away which distracts the enemies, creating the perfect window to jump back into the glorious action. Experiment and see what can be done, then look up what others have found and add it to your arsenal. And I almost forgot to mention there are some entertaining set pieces and a tasteful use of quick time events. Simple, fun, brilliant, that’s Vanquish during combat.

Outside of combat there’s not a whole lot going on and I have to mention some negatives after all that gushing. It doesn’t have good downtime sections or anything else to break up the combat and maybe help with pacing. There are some gold statues to find and shoot. It has these little, unskippable forced walking and listening sections. Don’t worry though; they aren’t bad compared to other games and they are brief. Speaking of wasting time, you are often waiting for stuff like doors and what felt like a whole lot of elevators. When not in fights it really mostly just boils down to moving though linear spaces or waiting. Also a lot of stuff in the combat sections has been a bit tired for a long time now in both first and third person shooters; like being on a turret or getting through an area with a silenced sniper rifle but at least it’s trying to throw in some variation. I wish the rating system was a little clearer and better too. But again I must say this game is aiming for a pure simplicity.

This was my first time going back to Vanquish since I first played it around the time it launched on PS3. I have thoroughly enjoyed coming back to it and realised I should have done so sooner. Vanquish isn’t perfect and it might be a little underwhelming or undercooked. But its simplicity, focus and shortness are its strength too. It is so fun, highly re-playable and rewarding. Maybe Vanquish doesn’t need skill trees, unlockables, a more open or interesting world, or a good story because it is too busy just being kick arse. Vanquish is a must play action game and one that should be learned from, I highly recommend it.

8.4/10

It's an alright game. The sliding can be fun but the shooting itself is pretty meh. But that's kinda all the nice I have to say. The story goes past the so cheesy its good and is just kinda really awful and uninteresting. The visuals are uninspired and dull with the grey and browns that have plagued far too many shooters. It just doesnt really feel worth it to keep playing, having completed just about 2/5s of the game so far I can tell It's just gonna be worth more of the same. Maybe it wont be, and it sucks to give up on a game but, I just dont think life is long enough to waste any more time on it.

Shelved for the forseeable future: likely forever

Nancymeter - 51/100

Superb third person shooter that's somewhat underappreciated. Would be nice to see a future game try something similar. The final boss on god hard difficulty is my favorite boss fight in any action game. It's fun and fair while being very challenging.

Lots of untapped potential in gameplay mechanics. A sequel seems unlikely but maybe there'll be a spiritual sequel (like P.N.03 -> Vanquish) or something heavily influenced.

Has barely any bonus content compared to bayonetta. Only unlocks are the 5 challenge stages and god hard difficulty. Even though it was in development for longer than MGR parts of level design in Vanquish seem rushed.

Something that disappoints me is that Platinum was trying to appeal to western audiences with this game which didnt turn out too successful. Since God Hand and PN03 sold poorly Mikami apparently wanted the dev team to hold back on the crazy stuff, and the soundtrack is mostly generic. I wonder what this game could have been with some more time and freedom. Though I bet they had some ideas for a sequel since the games ending leaves room for one.

God Hard difficulty is perhaps the hardest mode in any game by Platinum. It's unfair and ridiculous at points but can be played through in a stylish way with enough experience.

This era of gaming was sort of a bloodbath for Japanese games that tried to chase western trends only to end up being generic, often baffling messes that ended up alienating their audiences, most of whom were never interested in the games they were chasing after in the first place.

Vanquish was absolutely not one of those cases. It's a perfect example of taking a genre that was feeling horribly over-saturated and done to death (namely, cover based third person shooters) and putting an inventive and wildly fun spin on it, turning it into an absolutely manic and entertaining joy that's basically just a "character action" game (as horribly vague as that genre term is) disguised as a shooter.

I love the aesthetic as well. Like the game itself, it feels like a smart, well-realized mashup of the gritty, realistic art direction that games of this era loved, but meshing it with a certain sci-fi look and styling that almost feels like its descended from the Dreamcast in some ways. The soundtrack, though not really anything I'm hankering to listen to outside of the game, fits this vibe quite well too.

There's a few slow, boring bits in the already brief campaign, the story is pretty boring (though it has its moments) and if I'm telling the truth, in retrospect the lack of any multiplayer does genuinely feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. But overall, this is a genuine classic from Platinum, and definitely one of their finest hours.

Shame the initial release sold like shit, though. In another timeline Sega and Platinum could've had a genuine franchise on their hands.

Wanted to replay this since RE4make is right around the corner and Mikami himself is leaving Tango (and probably retiring).

While the upgrade system can be a bit punishing and the story is generic, Vanquish is still my favorite platinum game featuring bombastic action and amazing gunplay with the most fun Platinum protagonist Sam Gideon. Real shame it'll never get a sequel but god I still love it all the same.

9.5/10

Platinum games have a certain prestige to them. Almost universally renowned for their gameplay. Vanquish is often pointed out as one of their more underrated titles. But I have to be honest, I really don't get it and I wish I did.

Originally i gave this a 5/10 and shelved it, saying I had already seen everything the game had to offer in the first two acts and wanted to focus on other games at the time. Well now that Im trying to empty my backlog and raise my trophy completion I decided to come back to this. I do admit my initial score was a bit too harsh but for the most part my feelings remain the same.

The gameplay in Vanquish is good. Sliding and boosting is fun and there are a solid amount of unique weapons. I appreciate how it can be a cover shooter but you're rewarded for not doing that. It also has a pretty interesting upgrade system. If you pick up the same type of weapon with full ammo you'll get parts towards an upgrade. This is a pretty nice idea even if it did mean more often than not i tried not to use a weapon so i'd always have enough ammo to upgrade. But the shooting is just, fine? it doesnt really feel spectacular and a lot of the guns are pretty weightless. Boosting is fun but you don't really have much energy anyways. I don't know. Its an absolutely solid gameplay system but when I think about my favorite combat systems in games this one just didn't really blow me out of the water.

The story is also really bad. Not in the fun and cheesy way like Bayonetta, its just terribly dull. None of the characters or dialogue are all that likeable. Sam as a protag is pretty empty but he has one or two cool moments. I do appreciate that the story all takes place during the course of one mission, I think thats pretty cool honestly and would like to see more "military" games try that approach. But the level variety is very lacking. If im being honest the game looks really ugly. It has that annoying "everything should be greyed out because its a 7th gen shooter" thing going for it and it just is really unpleasant too look at. Some boss designs are cool but theyre reused multiple times as well so even they feel samey. The game also lacks a proper conclusion. Its not as bad as like Call of Duty Ghosts but it definitely feels like sequel bait and when the story is already so undercooked as it is, it left me with a very unsatisfying experience.

I think Vanquish isnt a bad game, its just a pretty okay one. Its short and the fast paced combat is nice so its definitely worth a play but I can't say this is a game i'll look back on fondly, or even really remember at all.

I wish I felt differently but hey, at least im digging the other platinum game im playing. Sorry so many of my reviews lately have been like 2.5s or 3/5s lol I dont like to be so negative but I like to think I give everything a fair shot at the least. Thanks for reading everyone <3

Trophy Completion - 54% (35/51)
Time Played: 7 hours 47 minutes (save file says 3 hours 25)
Nancymeter - 61/100
Game Completion #136 of 2022
November Completion #2

A rare good video game from late 7th gen

The late 2000’s to early 2010’s were a wasteland. Generic Call of Duty clones, the infamous western push by Capcom, bland cover shooters, Microsoft’s Kinect. It was a dark time. However, in 2010, Platinum Games under direction of Shinji Mikami came out with a unique gem that feels like it’s from 2004.

Vanquish still has many typical quirks of the era. There’s regenerating heath, cover shooting, and a limit on how many weapons you can carry, but Vanquish uses these characteristics in different ways to create a unique game.

Combat in Vanquish boils down to using slow-motion sparingly to pick-off standard enemies with headshots while ensuring your position limits how many enemies have a sight line on you. Vanquish shouldn’t be played like a cover shooter, but it also shouldn’t be played rolling all over the place out in the open. I think this is where new players get confused.

The cover shooting and acrobatic moves with Max Payne slow-mo should be used congruently. You have limited power for your suit. Dive out of cover, pick off an enemy, then reposition somewhere else to limit gunfire from enemies. Like all Mikami’s third-person action titles, player positioning is paramount. Sticking only in cover will result in you soaking up damage constantly because you aren’t moving or slowing time. Cover is a great way to take out one enemy while waiting for your suit to recharge a bit.

Vanquish’s combat is simple, but it’s a short game with tons of set-pieces. There’s no typical rooms in Vanquish, but they also don’t vary so much that it feels like a different game. There’s always a new boss, new enemy, or new obstacle that’s unlike the previous one. These set-pieces don’t take away control and use the mechanics of the game to great effects.

Player agency is high and it incentivizes playing well. It’s easy to fall into rhythm with Vanquish, and that’s a sign of good design steering the player towards a intended way to play. The upgrading system punishes deaths hard. Upgrade pickups are rare and dying results in loosing a star. Dying also takes 1000 points away at the end of each mission. There’s a time bonus at the end of each level as well which encourages the player to get out of cover and get aggressive. I just wish there was some sort of ranking system instead of just comparing to your own personal best.

It’s not all perfect however. Regenerating health is never a good thing. Sitting in cover and waiting isn’t fun. Vanquish uses regen health to stress player positioning, but health packs around the arena could have had the same effect or maybe healing from defeated enemies like Doom (2016).

The story and characters are fun, but they’re not great. I love government conspiracies but it’s generic to say the least. I do thoroughly enjoy the dick-measuring that goes on between Burns and Sam. It’s fun.

Aesthetically, Vanquish could’ve been better. Coming out in 2010 results in a drab game. Brown, white, and grey at every turn. For the premise this game has, it’s surprising how bland the art direction is.

And for all the praise I gave the combat, there’s some issues. Even though I listed the set-pieces as a positive, there’s a few that are bad. The stealth section is really bad. Just shoot the lights and you win. All the times on the tram limits where you can move. Vanquish does turn into a generic cover shooter in these moments because the player positioning has been stripped away.

I know it was trying to be punishing, but having your suit’s power drop to zero just because you went to critical health is annoying. It makes you sit in cover and wait even longer than you’d have to normally. There should be a way to cancel it with a risk-reward.

Vanquish isn’t quite as good as Mikami’s best (God Hand/ RE4) but it’s excellent. The gameplay loop is addicting and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It ends when it needs to and you can replay it in an afternoon off. I come back to this one often.

8/10

On the face of it, Vanquish looks like just another generic cover shooter, but it’s anything but that. Fast movement and an incredibly satisfying power sliding system enable you to zip across arenas at breakneck pace, dodging bullets and dispatching enemies with the well-timed usage of your slow-mo ability. Cover shooting is still a viable option but is nowhere near as satisfying as sliding out of the way of bullets and missiles as you see them brush past your face in slow motion before you return fire and take out those attempting to murder you. The gameplay is fast and frenetic but gives you just enough time to catch your breath and not make it feel like you’re just making your way through endless shooting galleries. I can’t stress enough how good the moment to moment gameplay feels.

Enemy design is also top notch, with creative visuals, robust AI and plenty of variety, with new enemy types being introduced regularly throughout the campaign. I particularly enjoyed being able to break down larger enemies by dismembering their body parts before finishing them off. Another high point is the fantastic and varied level design, taking advantage of the futuristic setting, evolving battlefields and verticality to make for some really memorable sequences and set pieces. There’s some decent weapon variety to use on these missions too. It’s just a shame that they are not well balanced, meaning you’re probably going to use a similar loadout for most of the game, and being only able to upgrade weapons that are fully loaded is such a pointless requirement.

The game’s narrative is pretty generic and forgettable. It’s the sort of plot and characters that could’ve been put into any action movie and is not engaging whatsoever. The premise is interesting enough, but the execution is poor. The highlight for me genuinely might be how realistic they managed to get smoking a cigarette to look in cutscenes. Luckily the gameplay is the focus so this didn’t really detract from my experience too much.

Vanquish gave me some of the best thrills I’ve had playing a videogame. It’s slightly marred by a lacklustre story and some questionable design decisions, but that doesn’t stop it from being a stellar third person shooter.

2010 Ranked
Ranked Shooter Campaign Recommendations

When you say dash shooter I am your player. This game have great potential but held back by some strange design choices.

This is a really fun game where you dash around, fire nonstop, burn every robot up. The kind of game that, when you finish a mission you look at the screen smiling and energized. The arcadey type of game that doesn't force long clunky animations on you, the type that instantaneous and fast. You can even change you weapon on the fly where most of the third person games force you to wait on a weapon taking animation.

It's not perfect tho, I have some small nitpicks about it.
-For some reason melee combat punishes you with taking your energy rather than giving it, in my opinion it should be other way around
-There is so many weapons, but half of them heavy weapons like sniper, rocket launcher, energy ball etc. I don't think they go well with this type of game. Also weapon grabbing is not automatic so this slows the game down too with forcing you to search when you are out of bullets.
-There is a weapon upgrade system that is pretty weird. If you find the same weapon again or an upgrade kit, it's get upgraded. But if you die, you lose one of them. I don't know why they did that, in my opinion weapons should scale up depending on your ranking at the end of battles not with upgrade kit hunting.
-Too many game boundaries, there is invisible barriers everywhere for some reason. Just let me jump from the rubble at least? It feels like it limits the movement in my opinion.

Even with those nitpicks I still had a great time on gameplay

The part that where I didn't enjoy is, game keeps interrupting us with unnecessary radio dialogues and unlike mgs they don't matter on anything. They say, go here, do this etc. Why do you stop the gameplay to do that? You don't even trying to tell a interesting story. That's such a stupid decision. Also characters are really boring. For some reason this game trying to be gears of war like characters where everyone is grumpy, keep swearing and looking angrily everywhere... Not a great decision where the gameplay designed to be fun and energized rather than being grumpy. But story takes the energy down with doing opposite.

This game gave me great time where you spam dashes and fire your guns non stop to watch the beautiful explosions. But if they cut the unnecessary parts this game could even go higher for me, just for the reason cutting every interruptions alone. Even with that I recommend this to everyone that loves zipping around, firing your gun nonstop and just having a great time.

It's a crime this game is only 5 hours long and has a really lame final chapter. That being said, this doesn't stop the game from being baller as fuck.

Finally, a cover shooter that isn't a tranquilizer shot in video game form. Sliding down, while shooting enemies is so damn fun, being able to pick your enemies off while in slow-mo is meth to me god it's fucking good.

The story is really silly and fun and something you can turn your brain and Sam is a really enjoyable character with his one-liners and all and the environments are really pretty.

Anyways, shame Mikami is now making FarCry but in japan nowadays, talk about a fall from grace!

If you're under the impression of this game being an action title masquerading as a cover shooter, then let me break it to you, it's not an action game by any stretch of the imagination, it is simply a repetitive and extremely flawed movement focused cover shooter with a mind-numbingly boring gameplay loop. Even as a shooter this game has very little entertainment value as it is loaded with meat sponge boss fights that require 0 strategy to take down and can be extremely tedious in the hardest difficulty while also offering little to no actual enemy variety in the mob department. And on top of all that the game is plagued by god awful pacing where you sometimes watch cutscenes that are straight up longer than the actual gameplay segments and the narrative being non-existent with nothing but corny dialogues does not help its cause. Visuals and Music are quite samey and forgettable too which is fitting since the entire game is just that "forgettable"

The story's a snore, the characters a bore, the environments bland, but the action is grand. This is the best Third Person Shooter campaign ever made.
Though that's not exactly a high bar and I still have a laundry list of minor quibbles with the game:
Unskippable walky-talky sections are regrettably baked into the campaign. Enemy variety is somewhat low. If vsync is disabled you run the risk of ladders and QTEs breaking for reasons pertaining to game-logic once again being tied to framerate. Challenge stage 6 is bullshit.
But the game is fun. Headshots are satisfying and dodging into bullet time lets you apply tons of pressure. Getting into the flow of dashing across the stage wiping out clusters of Gorgies efficiently makes for excellent game-feel.
Anyway fuck cover and face to boost-power.

A shut-your-brain-off cover shooter. Shoot grunts, shoot bigger bullet-sponge guys, shoot boss in weak spot, rinse-repeat for 5 or so hours. Not a bad time for an afternoon, but not a blast either.

It would be a lot more fun if the game had a big arsenal of unique and satisfying weapons to match its sorta goofy vibe, a la Resistance or Ratchet and Clank; but the only ones that felt any good to use, to me, were the most rudimentary: shotgun, assault rifle, HMG and rocket launcher. Suffice it to say, that got old.

Stray thoughts:

- The sliding-around-real-fast gimmick is fine, but sort of ancillary-feeling. Certainly not as foundational to the game as the marketing made it seem.
- I do really like a lot of the animations and enemy designs (the melee feels really bad but looks cool).
- The story is just mind-numbingly stupid.
- Played this on the 360, and goddamn were we tolerant of performance issues back in the day; the frame rate in this thing absolutely crawls in crowded sections, and the untoggleable motion blur looks like smeary ass, but I don’t remember anyone complaining about that in their 9-score reviews.
- Music is completely anonymous—not mixed loud enough? Seems like a missed opportunity for a game like this.

Bottom line, this is crazy overrated, but it’s got its charms if you go in with modest expectations. Grunt enemies DO fly backward when you hit them with a shotgun blast, which is my litmus test for good gunplay, so thumbs up.

Pure video games. First time playing this since it came out and I'd forgotten just how much of a "video game" it is. Vanquish isn't worried about telling a story let alone a good one. Like Doom 2016 and Eternal it has plenty of modern day gaming elements like actual cutscenes, but none of that shit matters. Get out there and shoot the shit out of robots for 4 and a half hours. It does this all so right and constantly that being upset about the near nonexistent story would just be silly. Game feels great and it's fun. All I need.

Platinum's output from Madworld all the way to Bayonetta 2 is just so, so special. It's such a sadness their CEO is going to lead them to a slow bleed out from working on live service bullshit.