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.

I don't think I'm surprising anyone by saying that PlatinumGames has made a fun action game here - at this point, it's something to be expected. My praise for Vanquish comes from concepts: it's a refreshing take on seventh gen third-person shooters, where speed and power management take precedence over hiding and waiting. After fumbling through the first few levels, the game finally clicked for me: I began to see new areas as gardens of opportunity rather than simple arenas to shoot through. Accelerating at top speed, slamming boots-first into a robot's face, slowing down time to shoot on the fall down... It's exhilarating stuff. There was never a time in the game where the combat felt explicitly unfair: the wide range of weapons, movement options, and open areas gave a ton of wiggle room. The tools are always there, and it's up to you to utilize them best. The upgrade system encourages the player to pick favorites, and helps cement a playstyle that works for you. I favored the assault rifle and sniper, but I can just as easily see someone maxing out heavier and/or more niche armaments. Definitely going to come back to this one someday and play it on a harder difficulty.

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.

In Vanquish you play as DARPA research assistant Sam, a cigarette-smoking jet.. man. After the cyber-Soviets microwave San Francisco, it's up to you to save the day.

If that sounds bizarre, well, the story is nonsensical, the writing is laughably bad and extremely cheesy (pro?) to the point you can't really understand anyone's real motives (..con). As for the gameplay: although it's fun, it doesn't really do more than run and gun. Or should that be "jet and reset"?.. over and over and over.

I will say that, yes, it looks incredible and may be one of the few examples of a rotating space habitat put to screen, but I'm torn as to whether I'd recommend anyone play Vanquish. Took me about 5 hours on easy (not easiest) mode. I kept coming back for more, so I guess it was just about worth my time.

This game is so goddamn fun, if you put me into a empty room with this game and a bucket, I'd eat the bucket, and play this game for days. It's short, on a take your time playthrough, it's about 6 hours. But in this case, it's by design. It's meant to be replayed so you can get better and better. The gameplay is like a third person bullet hell, and has tons of hidden mechanics and strategies for shooting and punching the shit out of robots and looking stylish as hell while doing it. The story is there. It's more of a reason to give you the game to play, though I do like our main character, think there's a lot of charm there. If you love action games, you owe it to yourself to play Vanquish.

A frontalidade que compele essa dinâmica tão íntima de corpo e espaço, constitutivo na apreensão do movimento efetivo que se expressa enquanto figuração e objetividade. A performance exerce sua maior delimitação em Vanquish, sendo reflexo da típica antropofagia oriunda da genealogia dos japoneses, que é essa adequação e digestão de narrativas e arquétipos conceituais exógenos, afinal, Vanquish evoca Gears, Halo e outros jogos ocidentais - que há de ser um intertexto e interdiscurso tendo em vista que isso é um processo de retroalimentação mecânica e estética, dado que quem dirige Vanquish é o Shinji Mikami que concebeu esse paradigma de jogo de tiro no singular Resident Evil 4 e, sobretudo, nos jogos póstumo em terceira pessoa que pauta Gears nas suas formulações mais diretas, portanto, é um processo mútuo de adequação poética, no entanto, aqui localizado na idiossincrática totalidade discursiva e sistemática japonesa -, enquanto se ressignifica em um referencial japonês que radicaliza as suas tensões da imagem, não somente propondo um processo reativo ao personagem, e por extensão, ao jogador, mas fruindo o movimento por toda sua dimensão de vitalidade.
Sinto que isso é o que há de mais genuíno em uma projeção tanto imagética, quanto interativa, de subtrair do espaço sua intimidade, sua afirmação primitiva e ao mesmo tempo sofisticada, que configura, até mesmo um flerte com hermenêutica filosófica, o espaço que vincula o movimento incita e tedenciona as subjetividades, Vanquish entende isso afirmando essa condição em uma literalidade estilizada, criticando a instrumentalização da guerra para fins mercadológicos incitando e tendencionando qualquer sujeito que se procrie dessa perfomance, dessa teatralidade interativa, dessa singularidade fluída mediada pelos aparatos mecânicos e sensitivos de interação, pelo contato de transgredir os corpos pelo controle do espaço, uma disputa dos sentidos que o mesmo desdobra

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

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.

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.

Vanquish is absolutely wild. The amount of bullets flying in all directions at any given time is insane. Playing the game as intended by sliding around from cover to cover and using your slowmo ability by dodging, sliding or meleeing enemies will inevitably lead to damage being taken and even a few (or a lot of in my case) lives lost.

I wish the health system was a little more clear since sometimes I'd have full boost meter and still die instantly to an explosion, and other times it'd just put me in a critical state. Also another small problem I had was the walking bits for dialogue exposition. The story is crazy and fast paced, but it isn't THAT deep. Trying to give the player these slower moments in a very arcadey style shooter is a bit disjoined.

I also didn't end up sticking with any of the more gimmicky guns like the saw blade shooter, aerial lock on bow, or energy ball blaster. An assault rifle, heavy machine gun, and rocket launcher worked great, especially with the upgrade system where picking up duplicates and upgrade cubes would increase their power, ammo pool, or other attributes to the weapons.

Overall though, very fun shooter that flashes that Platinum level flair in its cutscenes and pure spectacle during gameplay.

Vanquish hurts me, because it's such a fun game. Nothing else is quite like it, even games like ULTRAKILL, which share the core concept of "what if DMC was a shooter?" go a drastically different way. And in terms of gameplay, Vanquish is damn perfect. Every single action is so so satisfying, every mechanic is perfectly balanced with every other one, and there is so much depth while remaining very accessible.

And yet... that's it. There's nothing else to Vanquish. The story is the most basic military sci-fi shooter plot you could imagine. You've probably already thought of half its plot points, and you'll probably figure out the other half by the time you've seen the intro. The dialogue is boring, the characters are uncharismatic, and it even ends on a cliffhanger. The game is short, lacking in variety, reuses its bosses like it's a fetish and never truly feels like it's making the best use of its potential. And the reason that hurts so much, even though it's still a good game on its own, is that if it, or a sequel, had been capable of truly iterating on their mechanics, they'd have been a damn masterpiece.

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.

Short and sweet with super entertaining combat mechanics and bonkers boss battles.

The story is...fine? Your lead character is a fun "don't give a shit" kind of guy, but the plot is overly convoluted and yet somehow not fleshed out enough. It's a bizarre combo that leads to what feels like a super rushed ending, but it isn't outright bad. Definitely the weakest link.

The act of blast sliding forward never gets old and always feels good no matter how many times you do it. The action is worth the price of admission, even if the story won't be much to remember.

This was alright. Great production for sure, but everything cool in the gameplay is buried in the military cover shooting. Why does a guy with jet boots on his legs need soldier buddies to stand around getting shot at? Why is the recovery so damn long? How come you’ve got zero space to slide until they have u running down the hallway like it’s recess?

How come the weapons suck? Not every gun, but there’s one called “LIFE Gun” that shoots a big fat ball of electrical energy. But that mf curve like busy bitch and can barely wipe out one guy. LAME. The whole campaign has that undercurrent for me after beating act 2 and uninstalling.

NO COLORS
NO JAPANESE RPG WRITERS
NO PLOT BEATS

100% PURE UNCUT 7TH GEN ROCK