Simply insane!

Vanquish was always a game I meant to get into but never did. I heard fantastic things about it in the past, but had heard that the original console versions of the game were not the way to go. Understandably, I waited. I eventually picked up the Bayonetta/Vanquish double pack steelbook for PS4, and had every intentions of playing the game that way, but since I got a semi-competent PC, I went for that option, and I certainly chose the better way to play this for the first time.

Vanquish is a simple to learn, hard to master 3rd person cover shooter, where you break past the usual bonds of just hunkering down in cover for inconceivable amounts of time and do pop shots from chest-high walls for 7 hours until the credits roll. Vanquish may have those elements, but it actively discourages you from just sitting in cover all day, rather engaging you in crazy moment mechanics that see you zipping around combat arenas at mach speeds when comparing to other traditional cover shooters. The sole job of Vanquish is to provide a high-octane adrenaline high as you pull off the most insane of tricks in a fluid ballerina dance of carnage, and it fulfills that role near flawlessly.

The gameplay of Vanquish is something that just cannot be accurately described in writing; it’s something you have to experience for yourself, but make sure that if you are to play it, that you give it a go on either of the current-gen ports or the PC port. As far as the PC port, I ran into few issues but nothing that actively hampered my experience. I had brief frame drops for a while, but after doing some simple menu configurations I ran a buttery smooth 60 FPS at 1080p at high settings with my mid-range PC, and I did encounter a single hard crash towards the beginning of the game, which was frustrating, but the game’s more forgiving checkpoint systems didn’t cause too many issues. Using the mouse and keyboard for your control options ultimately feels like the way to go, here. The precision of the mouse is something that feels needed to keep pace with the rest of the game; actively making sure you keep pace with all the insanity happening around you. The ability to zip around quickly with the mouse means that I was able to get effective headshots and target weak points with far more ease than what a gamepad would provide, but I guess now that I’ve experienced what seems to be the best way to play, I’m more curious than ever to try my PS4 version to see how a gamepad stacks up.

Anyway, Vanquish may be a simply fantastic game, but it does have its faults, though not many.

The first issue I have with Vanquish is that I just couldn’t really get into its narrative. I understand that for a game that’s just SO gameplay focused, that the story is more of an afterthought than anything else, but I never really cared for what was happening at any point in time. This also relays into the dialog, which is super hokey as expected coming from Shinji Mikami, but its funny moments mostly land flat with its one-dimensional characters that just scream at each other like Gears of War characters.

I also would’ve liked to see a bit more enemy variety. I honestly like that most of the game already has a rather good variety of robot enemies with variable move sets and weapons but killing robots over and over again does get tiresome after a while. Boss encounters shake this up a bit, each of which are all rather great, but I could’ve done with a few more enemy types to really keep the pace going stronger. Ultimately, the enemy variety issue isn’t that big of a problem, mainly because the game is rather short, so it never outstays its welcome. For a “normal” difficulty run, I finished the game at around 6 ½ hours, which was just fine for me.

My last complaint comes from certain enemy types which can be super cheap in their attacks. I know that Vanquish ultimately gives the player the upper hand in combat scenarios through the ungodly speed given to you, but no matter the game, I have always hated one-hit-kill attacks, and this game has a few, which had me stuck in certain points of the game. Without those attacks, I honestly could’ve finished this game closer to 6 hours flat, but certain cheap attacks can either do the aforementioned one-hit-kill, or you can draw the short straw from the luck stack in certain QTE scenarios where you can start a QTE with good footing, but end it being swarmed by enemies, making it nearly impossible to make it out alive.

So, yeah, don’t play Vanquish for the story, that’s obvious, but if you want a stupid, phenomenal gameplay experience unlike any other, this is a MUST PLAY, and you have to play it NOW!

Years past its PlayStation3 debut, Vanquish is still the highest realization of third person shooters videogames. It implements the easy, familiar and stale cover mechanics made mainstream by Gears of War, Uncharted and Mass Effect, then shatters them by evolving the system to new and still today unreached heights. Cover mechanics are usually built to make the players feel protected during gunfights, safe spots that restrict movements, making the game akin to a less explicit tower defence; they feel derivative and rarely rewarding since, aside adding maybe different weapons thorough the playthrough or forcing incentives to move from one cover to another, once you played a cover shooter the general gameplay will always be identical.

Then along came Platinum Games, they decided that staying put picking out enemies from safe spots was slow and bollocks and crafted an eight-hour long joyride in outer space, with augmented movesets, faster combats in larger arenas and their signature excessive aesthetic of B-movie camp dialogues and relentless action. Vanquish major gameplay’s accomplishments are in its implementation of the Augmented Reaction (AR) suit and its versatility: this AR suit allows the utilization of boosters to rapidly traverse the game areas, ram into enemies, change covers, as a vast and more powerful sprint mechanic. Not so rare for cover shooters is also the dedicated dodge button, but unlike other more – tentatively – ‘realistic’ videogames, in Vanquish there is no input or animation delay, the dodge is omnidirectional and with immediate, if none, recovery time, thus guaranteeing quick means of evasion and closing in on enemies.

Another Platinum’s well-known gadget is the AR mode, a device to slow time, reminiscent of Bayonetta’s Witch Time, that enhances precise aim and favours more calculated movements. AR mode however has to be triggered via players’ movement of the character, be it a dodge, a boost sprint, a drop kick against an enemy, vaulting out of cover, thus incentivising the players to actively leave covers and experiment with the versatile combat. Alternatively, receiving too much damage and being put in critical condition will automatically trigger the AR mode, yet also deplete its charge completely, as would an abuse of boost and AR mode. The ingenious thing is, once the AR suit is overheating and the players temporarily lose the ability too boost and slow time, it doesn’t immediately equate to a death sentence, there always is the safe having of taking cover and letting both the suit and health points regenerate: meaning, the game’s ‘punishment’ for lacking resources management is to play a standard cover shooter. How lovely.

Vanquish though failed to find strong public recognition in its lifetime, because aside from its revolutionary, immensely fun and hard to master gameplay, and for the high-quality production in cutscenes and graphic, the rest of the package is rather bland. Sound design does its job, but there is nothing impressive in both soundtrack and gunplay, which are hardly distinguishable from other products of the same genre. Enemies design lack variety and interesting mechanic to counter, will all of them, small and big, playing the same with annoying long-range distractions and close quarter devastating one-hit kills. Visually speaking there also isn’t much to look at, even bosses are devoid of the usual Platinum’s intentionally grandiose scale, with intricated mechanical designs and diverse battles, as they were, for example, in Binary Domain.


Speaking of Binary Domain, the screenwriter could’ve also used some more inspiration from better science-fiction sources. While the latter videogame could offer a compelling narrative, with clear developed characters, in Vanquish things seem to happen mostly just because: the story’s premise revolves around a terror attack and a war declaration to the US from a Russian space colony, which is promptly invaded and made theatre of mayhem. All in all there are about five or six recurring characters and none of them seems to have strong motivations to achieve anything; there is a mission to accomplish, but it is as empty as generic as the quest mark on the minimap, with no personal struggle in between nor certainly any social commentary about terrorism and the dark side of politics. Most of the time something happens just so stuff can blow up, a la Michael Bay but with even less pretence of seriousness.

It is a mess, but indeed a beautiful mess to look at, and even more beautiful and engaging to play.

Vanquish failed to grab me right away, and I was a little miffed about that. Then I shelved it for a few years, came back to it, and was still miffed when it still failed to grab me right away. But that was silly.

Once I gave it the time it deserved and grew into it, Vanquish turned out to be a challenging, deep, exhilarating shooter. Its story/writing are absolutely ludicrous, but besides that, I have no real qualms with it.

Vanquish is hard and frustrating at first. You have to unlearn some shooter habits in order to succeed, but you also have to master some real off the wall mechanics and techniques to feel like a champ. It does not come quickly or easily. But like MG Rising, the payoff is worth it.

The graphics are decent, though somewhat bland. But it's a nifty, very arcadey art style and color palette. It screams Sega to me, which it is (not that that's a good or bad thing). But the animation is crisp and smooth, delivering a mile-a-minute shooter experience that really assaults the senses in a good way.

Overall, Vanquish grew on me slowly, but the more I played it, the more I liked it. I look forward to dipping my feet back in sometime in the future, where hopefully I will fall somewhere higher up on the learning curve again even if it's a couple years from now!

i thought vanquish was almost too generic for its reputation for a while there, and while i don't believe its mission structure ever gets creative enough to justify its cool slide boost mechanic it is ultimately a work of pure joy story-wise and really comes into its own on the last two acts.

i think this game needed to be fused with titanfall 2 so you could run on walls and shit but obviously replace the silly american pathos of boy and his robot story with this japanese depiction of US interventionism and over the top machismo.

i am hyped to play metal gear rising after this because it feels like platinum may have funneled what they had lying for this game's never-materialised sequel into that. this game itself wears its metal gear solid influence on its sleeve already.

Really fun third person shooter with a ton of style, love smoking a cigarette real quick while sitting behind cover like it's nbd. But man it does kinda wear out its welcome by the end, it doesn't introduce a ton of new mechanics, and even the new enemies slow to an absolute trickle by the end. Would have loved to see the core of this built out into something a bit more compelling, the gameplay loop and over the top writing are fantastic but it just needs that bit of extra spice to really feel like something special.

If Alpha Protocol is a game that shows the frustrated ambitions of the PS3 generation, Vanquish is a game that shows that generation's frustrating lazinesses. It's a game with one idea that does nothing to make that one idea work in a context beyond simply describing the mechanic. There's more fun to be had in the second after you're told "you can do a rocket slide and go into slow motion" and imagine that happening than there is in the game. Part of that is because it puts all its cool features, the rocket slide, the super punch, the slow motion, and the sometimes available laser gun, on the same cooldown so you can't juggle between a bunch of cool ways of playing, you can do one at a time and in between you have to play Gears Of Halo in the normal Gears Of Halo way. The other part is that there's no style or charm to the actual world and story, just reheated Metal Wolf Chaos without any of the chaos, just you doing Battle: Los Angeles with a guy who sounds like every drill sergeant and shooting Russian Covenant robots or whatever these enemies are supposed to be. It's Metal Gear Rising but without all the interesting parts.