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 difficult to think of a game I’ve played in recent memory that comes closer to being something I really love while also simultaneously being a deeply flawed mess. There are elements here that rank among the creepiest in the Amnesia series, but after a strong opening third or so, I just couldn’t really find my bearings.

First, the good. The opening 3-4 hours of this game are quite tense and frightening, in a way that reminded me of The Dark Descent. As in that game, the combination of expertly tuned sound design and disturbing imagery (that shows just enough to create dread while also maintaining a sense of mystery) is very effective early on. For me, this climaxes in a terrifying collection of sequences set in an abandoned French fort. This section of the game, from the beginning through the fort, functions as quality horror on both a conceptual and a visceral level.

Another improvement from earlier games in the series is that there is a significantly deeper level of character development, both for the protagonist (whose impending motherhood serves as a method of generating emotional investment in the story while also acting as source of deep-seeded apprehension) and for her fairly well-sketched cadre of former companions, who are mostly presented in flashbacks. Whereas Daniel from The Dark Descent was largely silent outside of reciting journal entries, the protagonist in this game is quite chatty - and while this talkiness isn’t always welcome, the voice actress does strong enough work that I largely bought the character and their motivation.

Sadly, it was the narrative around the protagonist that just straight-up didn’t work for me. There are a few reasons for this. For one, the pacing in this game is just awful. After I completed the section in the French fort, I figured that I was moving toward a climax of some kind…but instead, the game just goes on and on, with very little interesting plot development to justify some of the rather boring levels. Seriously, you will have to traverse every kind of subterranean environment you can think of - tombs, catacombs, mines, and so on - and they all feel just as bland as one might expect. This isn’t a particularly long game (maybe 9-10 hours), but I ended up feeling that at least 30% percent of it should have been cut.

The pacing issues are intimately connected to problems with the narrative, which is very unfocused. The main thrust with the protagonist recovering memories of a deeply upsetting moral quandary is fine, but it is weighed down by a bunch of unnecessary subplots that go nowhere. Which is unfortunate, because some subtlety might have made these dead-end subplots function as interesting Easter eggs. Instead, everything’s forced down the player’s throat. Even an inattentive player would likely be able to use environmental details to infer a connection between the alien dimension of this game and the plot events of The Dark Descent, but instead of leaving it at that, the game insists that you hunt down notes that clumsily and unnecessarily underline this same point. Throughout the game, elements of the story that should have been left ambiguous are rendered painstakingly obvious. Given that the Amnesia games rely at least partially on an element of mystery and fear of the unknown to draw the player in, the heavy-handed storytelling method on display is a major problem.

I also had a mechanical objection, which is that they ruined the brilliant sanity mechanic from The Dark Descent. In that game, losing your sanity messed with the interface in a way that triggered panic and anxiety in the player. But it never halted the play or took away control. In Rebirth, sanity is replaced with fear. My problem is that when your character is overcome by fear, it effectively shifts the game into a quasi-cutscene - the screen slowly begins to black out and a short jump scare sizzle reel plays as you try to button mash your way out of it. I hate how this takes control away from the player and seems to basically freeze whatever is going on in the game world at that moment. There is a plot element that explains why fear works like it does, but it just didn’t justify the mechanical downgrade from the sublime sanity mechanic for me.

As a huge fan of the work of Frictional Games, I went into this expecting greatness. I ended up disappointed, but also happy that I played this. There is a great game rattling around in here somewhere - it’s just buried under some clunky storytelling and a bunch of unnecessary chaff.

I wish I liked Iron Lung more. So much of what it attempts, and what it does well, are horror themes and practices that I tend to love/scare me. Isolation, weird alien deepest lore that you aren't really meant to understand,, and general creeping dread of the unknown. I really like how it puts you in the shoes of this poor sod laboured with this creep-ass submarine, and I like the aesthetic and hook of having to take increasingly creepy pictures of a hellscape, bound to go wrong, to navigate it.

So, why don't I love this? It seems like an easy slam dunk, and yes - for the most part - it's executed quite well. There's some spookiness to the navigation, and the game does have one very, very good scare.

And I think a lot of my problem is with Iron Lung's contrivance. The Sub is such a perfect horror location idea that it kind of feels fake in it's own way. It is probably just me, but the whole layout of everything feels artificial, designed around horror factor, perfectly claustrophobic, perfectly making you wait for the picture, perfectly putting the controls on the other side of the sub. Considering you spend the whole game in it, I do think this takes a lot of out of the experience - for me, there's always this feeling that I am ultimately in a safe, controlled environment which I just can't shake.

I also think the pacing is just a tad too slow. The game only comes out about an hour long, but I think there's just a bit too much dead air in that time, and the navigation is sadly mostly just annoying, which again is one of those things that can take you out of the horror elements easily.

Outside of it's one big setpiece, I just don't think Iron Lung is scary. A lot of the subtle stuff just feels a bit off, and the frustration overtakes the horror for me.

What's most frustrating perhaps is that David Szymanski's Squirrel Stapler, despite it's silliness and surrealism, is a far, far scarier game than Iron Lung, that's better paced, has a frankly incredible final setpiece. Seeing the same dev just make a few mistakes with a premise that could have turned out something far better is the saddest part of the endeavour.

Teh bucket of d00m.

A little disappointed with Ultra Deluxe on the whole. I was The Stanley Parable's biggest fan in 2011 - for being a free mod it was surprisingly cogent as an exploration of the metatext in being a player character in a perceivably linear world. The remake was a nice thing too, brushing up the concepts the mod introduced with some greater production values and more keen attention to detail, rounding off the branching paths it also expanded upon. While I'm nowhere near blown away by its observations (especially now that it's 2022 and the subject matter is rather rote by now), nor does its all-too-smug humour really tickle me in any way... it's undeniably satisfying to play a game that knows what to say and when. All bases covered, all nooks and crannies accounted for, everything you can do and everywhere you go triggers an event flag somewhere in the backrooms for the narrator to guffaw about. There's a toy-like quality to it idk, I'm really just like Stanley hitting buttons and listening to their accompanying sound effects.

Ultra Deluxe is... a few more things, all pretty scant. This almost Invader Zim-grade object comedy fixation on a funny bucket item you carry into old ending routes to modify them in minor ways, and the majority of the dialogue is still "press button to make narrator change subject". No guides or whatever are available at the time of me saying all this, who knows, maybe I've neglected to walk down a specific sequence of doors and missed a new skill tree system. They shifted the engine from Source to Unity, I'm sure it's a console porting decision and it certainly all looks better, but no longer getting banished to The Serious Room for setting sv_cheats to 1 removes the best rugpull from the game!!!!