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.