Vanquish

Western game design over the Xbox 360/PS3-generation owes more to Shinji Mikami than anyone in the West. Resident Evil 4 popularized the third-person shooter genre so familiar today, and Vanquish seeks to reinvent it with a focus on core mechanics and unabashed attitude once so prevalent among Japanese video games.

Playing as Sam Gideon, a character that seems to embrace everything lovably bad about 1980s video game protagonists, the player rockets through battle arenas that look like the spotless white future of Tron while slowing down time for critical shots. Gideon’s suit is equipped with jet boots that let the player boost from cover-to-cover, a necessary task given their temporal protection.

The sleek design and fast-paced action is what separates Vanquish from its competitors. Where Uncharted and Gears of War plod through their self-serious, cinematic campaigns, Vanquish encourages players to blaze through the game’s eight hours for a high score. The game’s nonsensical story and macho characters with horrible one-liners are a breath of fresh air. No emotional interplay is necessary when you are gliding between collapsing buildings and firing rockets at giant robotic spiders — so why bother? This isn’t Mikami’s answer to Uncharted 2. This is the game you daydreamed about during history class in 1997.

The story, dialogue and characters suck, though they're not vital; Vanquish is all about the gameplay, and it's spot on. One of the most memorable and exhilarating third-person shooters around.

3.5 stars / Good

Vanquish' high-speed action is like no other, with awesome blends of automatic artillery, spurts of quick movement both sustained and instantaneous, and judicious use of bullet-time, creating a gameplay system with a remarkable sense of flow. But it is also indicative of many of my misgivings with Platinum, with so many other facets of design being so half-baked it feels like the game was drafted on a lazy Saturday afternoon, which makes sense given that's the same amount of time it takes to beat it. None of the team or score-based options really mesh well with the gameplay offered, and obvious balance issues do harm the depth of the gameplay, with a story with an interesting premise (and certainly a unique ending) not being enough to make it stand up on its own for very long.

Worth a play, but to me is just another game to throw on the pile, an opinion I hold of many games from "the best Japanese developer still working today."

Like all platinum games, Vanquish is a game that i wanted to love much more than i actually do. When it comes to actual minute to minute gameplay it is excellent. It feels completly fresh in the tired TPS genre. The controls are tight, and its extremely satisfying to pull off crazy tricks. You are able to slow down time in particular moments, which if done right can provide some stunning stylish setpieces. The game doesnt really incentive you to play this way though, the only thing the scoring system takes into account is the amount of enemies killed, and a bonus if they are killed in quick sucession. You are given lots of cool unique weapons which can be upgraded throughout the campaign, and getting killed removes some of these upgrades, which again makes playing recklessly penalized by the game's rules.

Now about the flaws.. Platinum really struggles to nail down pacing in a campaign as this issue is also recurrent in Metal Gear rising. The story is utterly forgettable, with characters that make no sence and very little of them is memorable. Cutscenes are cringeworthy, like trying to make the lead character cool by the way he smokes cigars and with all the creep shots of the female protagonist ass. The plot also moves form action to action to action, there is little break time aside from elevator rides or walking across empty hallways. Very little variety in gameplay, as 99% of the encounters are presented as a big oval battlefield in which you must eliminate all enemies to proceed. A couple of bosses are rehashed multiple times as well, and this combined with the low types of enemies can make the game a bit repetitive (but this is fortunatly masked by the very strong gameplay). Its very short, like 5h hours, but actually it doesnt feel all that short considering how repetitive and formulaic it becomes. Which is a shame considering how strong the base gameplay is. All in all a very cool game, but it really has some very obvious shortcomings.

Western game design over the Xbox 360/PS3-generation owes more to Shinji Mikami than anyone in the West. Resident Evil 4 popularized the third-person shooter genre so familiar today, and Vanquish seeks to reinvent it with a focus on core mechanics and unabashed attitude once so prevalent among Japanese video games.

Playing as Sam Gideon, a character that seems to embrace everything lovably bad about 1980s video game protagonists, the player rockets through battle arenas that look like the spotless white future of Tron while slowing down time for critical shots. Gideon’s suit is equipped with jet boots that let the player boost from cover-to-cover, a necessary task given their temporal protection.

The sleek design and fast-paced action is what separates Vanquish from its competitors. Where Uncharted and Gears of War plod through their self-serious, cinematic campaigns, Vanquish encourages players to blaze through the game’s eight hours for a high score. The game’s nonsensical story and macho characters with horrible one-liners are a breath of fresh air. No emotional interplay is necessary when you are gliding between collapsing buildings and firing rockets at giant robotic spiders — so why bother? This isn’t Mikami’s answer to Uncharted 2. This is the game you daydreamed about during history class in 1997.