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.

As batalhas finais dão uma desanimada mas lá no ato 3 eu fiquei JESUS ESSE É O MELHOR JOGO DE TIRO JÁ FEITO quando você tá entrando sozinho no robô aranha (besouro?) gigante. O ritmo é perfeito nessa porção toda e a escala das batalhas é o que deveria ter sido o resto do jogo.

Vi uma review aqui falando que é um absurdo você ser punido por fazer execuções melee se aproximando do inimigo e apertando um único botão. Segundo essa pessoa, o ideal seria você ser recompensado. Achei essa crítica tão sem pé nem cabeça kkkkkk inclusive essa coisa de apertar o botão de execução pra matar o inimigo instantaneamente o tempo todo é uma das coisas que me impede de gostar mais dos novos Dooms. Tipo, não é difícil se aproximar dos inimigos. Apertar esse botão de morte instantânea só deixa as suas armas mais insignificantes.

A história é meio que um grande foda-se mas tem um charme em certos momentos e pelo menos tenta se distanciar um pouco da farofada fascista que esses joguinhos de milico tendem a ser.

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.

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.

Did you want to do meter management as you boost around from waist-high cover to waist-high cover, doing cool dynamic poses in slow motion while you shoot robots? Well, you SHOULD.

This game's presentation and set pieces are awesome. I love the voice-lines from SAM, the protag. I still quote them to this day.

Every weapon you pick up changes your melee attack and melee attacking almost always drains your meter completely. It's a fair trade off considering how powerful melee is. But this means you are encouraged to stay behind cover where you can. Which is strange for Platinum, who's known for really strong melee combat and rushing into the fray for some time bonus.

Picking up multiple stacks of the same gun upgrades the gun. There ends up being way too many upgrade levels per gun before you reach max in my opinion, resulting in maxing out one main weapon, and using your secondary slots for experimentation/ just messing around.
You'll end up leveling up grenades like mad because you'll forget you have them LOL. (They are really strong, please remember to use them.)

The music isn't very memorable, I'm struggling to remember anything that isn't the cool title screen ambiance.
The story is a tad uninspired and the ending is a total cliffhanger bummer.