6.5
High paced shooter with interesting mechanics and great fluidity. Liked the absurdity signature of Japanese games. Maybe the story could have been longer.
Imagine making a game that's 6 hours long and being so thin on level ideas that it still has an escort mission and a slow moving platform mission.
Could've been very good if it had a better health and damage indicators. Too often it was unclear if I was taking damage and if I was, from where and how much.
My favorite Platinum Game(s)
Another Mikami masterpiece. Like what he does with God Hand, The Evil Within and to a minor extent Resident Evil IV, Mikami blows up its respective genre, finding unique manners in which to pay earnest homage to overplayed tropes while subverting them with wacky self-aware humor, innovative cinematic flair, and challenging if at times indulgent gameplay. Vanquish works beautifully as a hilarious satire and mockery of Western third person shooters but stands just as well as a brilliant piece of pulp sci-fi with its nonsensical story, rousing set pieces, and electrifying visual spectacle. It's just gorgeous; zipping through its balletic warzone for six hours made for a surprisingly exciting experience. It feels like the prototype to what Titanfall II would eventually elaborate on with gooey sentimentality and a tighter structure but what Vanquish lacks with looser pacing it makes up for with its almost hypnotic pull. It's a trance-like dance of speeding bullets, pumping testosterone, ardent Russophobia, and endless rocket boosts. Front to back, it never lets up. Verhoeven would be proud.
A lot of fun. Though not my fave platinum game I was genuinely grinning from ear to ear for the majority of this one. Great use of cigarettes. My favourite gun was big laser.
Underrated game
Even if the movement should be declared one of the greatest World Heritages, it's not so easy to traverse its spaces. It all comes down to the same thing: positioning, but in this case everything is at a faster pace. The eccentric politics and parody of it all are the cherry on top
Also, the circular stage >> 2001: a space odyssey
Also, the circular stage >> 2001: a space odyssey
Transcendent core gameplay, mediocre 7th-gen jank everything else.
Another example of smoking being the coolest thing in fiction
shot gun, smoke a lot, with russian waifu
This is a game I wish I liked more. Everything about its style and presentation seems amazing, but when I start playing, it just doesn't jive the same. I think it's the fact that it is also a cover shooter. It kind of makes the game slow down more than I'd like. I'm just not a fan of ducking into cover. It's a weird juxtaposition in a game like this.
Had a good time with this one. Ridiculous story really got good at the end. The visuals are rather muddy and boring, but the gameplay is fun when you get used to the clunky controls. I thought the final boss fights were really fun. Uh, I don't have much to say. I had fun with it, but it didn't rock my world or anything.
Muito pika
This game sucks and is one of the worst games I've played I don't care this sucks. It's a short game yet is almost entirely padding with awful filler sections. Lots of the worst of 7th gen walk and talks, awful cutscenes, not a single thing is funny, not a single thing is interesting in this game. I get they must have ran out of time in development but 5 minutes total of fun gameplay does not make up for the fact this is nonsense. Meleeing makes you lose your health? Great, doing boring slowmo pot shots is so much more fun than sliding in and backflipping off of a guy. It encourages you to play in a way even more boring than a cover shooter, you just spam your invincibility button until you get your slowmo back. This sucks. It would have been good if they spent more time on the game and not the stupid nonsense story. Also the upgrading guns thing is just a stupid idea. I can't get over how much I did not like this game.
Incredibly fast-paced and engaging, one of the best action games of all time.
Gears of War with manually controllable Witch Time and a lot more mobility. Story kinda sucks and the level design isn't up to par with Platinum's best action games, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun
In terms of pure action, this is up there with Platinum's best, and a living testament to the vast potential of the cover shooter genre when it's given to designers who actually want to push it forward. That said, Vanquish is a proof of concept at best. It's only a few hours long, and there's definitely some inconsistency buried in its short runtime. Still, if you're looking for a short game to distract you for a weekend or two, this is an excellent game to buy on sale.
YEAHHHHHHHHHH
This game is about how imperialism sucks, both the US and Russia are bad, Hilary Clinton kills herself, and Dudes Rock.
platinum is hit or miss
this is definitely a great miss
this is definitely a great miss
I don't get it!
All you do is shoot giant robots and dash around. 6 hours of pure fun
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)
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)
Video game cocaine.
Was awhile ago when I played this but I remember I did the whole thing (~8hrs) in one sitting so safe to say I liked it.
Vanquish is an odd beast. Its story barely makes any sense, but it's so wild and hilarious that it doesn't really need to. A boost/bullet-time gauge and a plethora of weapons encourages fast and dangerous playstyles in a cover-shooter. But despite it all, it's genuinely a great time, albeit quite short.
The only real issues I had with the game were how weapons upgraded, and how your health works. Having to grab multiple duplicates of weapons while your ammo is full really causes you to fall into a trap of using a few specific weapons for the whole game, even if other weapons would be better options in given situations.
This game has that shooter trope of "your health recharges when you're not taking damage", and all that has ever done for me is make it extremely unclear how close to death I really am. Granted, you'll reach critical health or die quickly in Vanquish, but a health gauge to match your boost gauge would've been nice too.
Also, the loading screens have text blurbs that expand upon the game's characters/lore, but alas, my computer is not a 7th gen console, and the game loads in one second flat, before I get the chance to read anything. There also aren't very many secrets or unlockables, which seems odd for a Platinum game, but a highly linear adventure isn't always a bad thing.
Platinum's take on the third-person cover-shooter is definitely a cult classic in my eyes. If you haven't played it, you're definitely missing out. You can even get it on current-gen consoles and PC, you basically have no excuse. Pick it up and give it a shot.
The only real issues I had with the game were how weapons upgraded, and how your health works. Having to grab multiple duplicates of weapons while your ammo is full really causes you to fall into a trap of using a few specific weapons for the whole game, even if other weapons would be better options in given situations.
This game has that shooter trope of "your health recharges when you're not taking damage", and all that has ever done for me is make it extremely unclear how close to death I really am. Granted, you'll reach critical health or die quickly in Vanquish, but a health gauge to match your boost gauge would've been nice too.
Also, the loading screens have text blurbs that expand upon the game's characters/lore, but alas, my computer is not a 7th gen console, and the game loads in one second flat, before I get the chance to read anything. There also aren't very many secrets or unlockables, which seems odd for a Platinum game, but a highly linear adventure isn't always a bad thing.
Platinum's take on the third-person cover-shooter is definitely a cult classic in my eyes. If you haven't played it, you're definitely missing out. You can even get it on current-gen consoles and PC, you basically have no excuse. Pick it up and give it a shot.
sic hack and slash gun game
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
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