Exhumy Senpai is always recommending this game, so I picked it up a while back and finally decided to get to it now. It reminded me a lot of Binary Domain, to be honest. Kind of silly 3rd person shooter with heavy sci-fi elements and very pretty robots to kill. The story of Binary Domain is much more Yakuza in how dramatic it is, though. Vanquish's story is much more Metal Gear Revengence in how silly and parodist it felt. For reference, I played through on normal and it took me a little under 5 hours.

It's a cover shooter with some cool gimmicks. You can do different melees with different guns, you can boost around to get towards or away from an enemy quick, and you can also activate a bullet-time effect to get more accuracy and damage. The main problem is that these are all linked to the same rechargeable bar. This makes it fairly difficult to do anything super fancy without some advanced knowledge of what's coming, as you can't dash or bullet-time for very long before your meter runs out, and melee-ing an enemy completely depletes the bar. You also die pretty quick, so there's not a ton of room to experiment with that kind of nonsense.

Dying also sucks a fair bit. There are a good few guns in the game, and if you pick up an upgrade or another of that gun while you have full ammo for it and it'll slowly upgrade into better versions of itself. More max ammo, more max magazine size, more damage, faster fire rate, etc. It varies depending on the specific level up and the specific gun. The reason dying sucks is that it can downgrade all of your current guns. Even your grenades can get downgraded (as they can be upgraded the same way). I never found an exact formula for how many times you could die and not lose upgrades, but it was still a really annoying penalty.

That said, the game is super pretty, and the textures load right quick for a console game. There are several Platinum/Clover Studios references sprinkled throughout which made me giggle, like "whisky a go-go, baby!" x3 . Lots of big bosses to fight as well that are a proper good challenge, even if the same one does get recycled quite a few times :?

Verdict: Recommended. It's kinda campy and sci-fi and the guns feel good, but I still prefer Binary Domain. I can definitely see why this got a lot more shade when it came out at $60, this was a pretty darn short game for that price. It's much more pallatable at 10-ish, and same goes for Binary Domain at $5. Bottom line, if you don't like this, you just might like Binary Domain x3

I do think I'm gonna play some more Grasshopper Manufacture games this week though. Granted they didn't make this one, but they worked with the director of this game (Shinji Mikami) on Shadows of the Damned, and remembering that reminded me of all the GM games I have gone out of my way to get but haven't played. Looking forward to Killer is Dead tomorrow :)