Vanquish (PS3)
When it comes to sci-fi shooters, you can usually expect a pretty standard shooting game experience but with a futuristic coat of paint. The guns might shoot lasers and plasma, the enemies might be robots or aliens, but the gameplay boils down to the same mechanics you’d see in something like a war shooter. Vanquish by PlatinumGames tries to do something more with the genre setting though, leading to a game that not only throws in insane sci-fi setpieces to make it feel different, but also attempts to advance the cover shooter formula with new twists on the gameplay.
Set some time in the future, the game begins with San Francisco getting roasted by a satellite laser from a space colony. This attack was orchestrated by a new Russian regime that took over the colony and a full-on military attack is launched against this new and powerful foe. You take on the role of a special DARPA unit named Sam Gideon who has a specialized suit to make him more capable than the typical marines who will be aiding you on this mission. The game takes place entirely on the space colony, and while some of the areas look similar and generically sci-fi, the game still manages to mix up the scenery quite a bit and give unique feelings to its locations. The story itself is a bit all over the place though, certain important details reserved for loading screens you’ll have to read quickly while cutscenes that interrupt play will just devote themselves to nailing in the same few points again and again. The game flirts with messages about the necessary sacrifice of soldiers during war and the effects a war economy can have on the actions of politicians, so it’s not too hard to see why PlatinumGames would one day be asked to work with the Metal Gear license. However, the similar themes and visuals that would leak into Metal Gear Rising or be mirrored by Metal Gear Solid 4 are better covered there than in this game, where most scenes are just about Gideon arguing with his only consistent ally in battle Lieutenant-Colonel Burns about the same old things and saying how much they dislike each other. One thing the game does do well in regards to its cutscenes is just going all out on making a sci-fi spectacle. Enormous space battles that go on for quite a while rage in the opening cutscene even though you don’t participate in them at all, and at times this game almost feels like it could have been some action movie schlock instead, with a lot of mindless yet entertaining action to keep the viewer thrilled throughout.
Thankfully, not all the spectacle is reserved for the cutscenes. Vanquish won’t give you everything it shows, but it certainly throws you into intense and hectic situations. There’s a battle with an absolutely titanic machine, a monorail ride where you must fire on enemies who are on an upside-down train above you… even the first battle in the game has enormous spaceships crashing down onto the battlefield. The game does pull back so it doesn’t get overwhelming, but the fast-paced action scenes can certainly get your blood-pumping. Even the slower moments manage to give you some pretty good diversity. While the enemy types are pretty consistent throughout and the variety there runs dry a little too quickly, there are areas where you have to hold your ground, protect valuable hardware, push against heavily guarded encampments, and of course, there are boss battles. Sadly, the boss battles face the same issue as the regular enemies. There are a few bosses on offer that the game likes to repeat, and while simply shooting down common enemies doesn’t get too old since a confrontation is over quickly, facing the same boss multiple times wears thin. You do at least get gradually better at taking them down more quickly, but some more variety is obviously preferable to repeated battles.
Having high-octane settings is all well and good, but Vanquish knows it needs to back up that intensity with something more than standard shooting. The main focus in Vanquish is not so much the guns but how you shoot them, Sam Gideon’s specialized suit giving him a few unique skills for taking on the waves of robotic opponents. The first feature is perhaps the most important one in helping you take down foes: slowing down time. If you aim while dodging or sliding, time will slow down for a short amount of time, giving you opportunity to aim your weapons more carefully. With the fast-paced gameplay, this really comes in handy in giving you a moment to pick off difficult foes or land headshots to take them down more quickly, and of Vanquish’s new mechanics, this one feels executed the best. It can be activated pretty easily and comes in handy during almost every type of battle. Gideon is also given a rocket-powered slide to use to quickly tear through the battlefield, and as mentioned, you can slow down time during it to fire off shots. This is a bit more difficult than doing a flip to activate that feature though, with rocket sliding serving better as a quick way to navigate into or away from battle than the way you’ll want to activate the time slowing feature. That mostly comes down to the fact that Vanquish is still a cover shooter, with many areas packed with little barriers and boxes to hunker behind to gradually recover your health when you’re low. It’s difficult to slide around like a lunatic when Sam keeps slamming into walls and attaching to them, but the boss arenas and a few other locations seem to be more conducive to this interesting style of play. The last time you’ll see the time slowing activate is when you’re near death. It gives you the time needed to escape many hostile situations, but it also leads to the major drawback of these nifty new features: overheating. Your suit has a set amount of time it can do any of these skills, drawing on that power as well if you do one of your super strong melee attacks. It will slowly recover energy when it’s not in use, but if it’s out of juice, the suit overheats for a bit, needing time to vent the pressure and leaving you with only the basic shooter controls until its back online. It is certainly an understandable limitation and prevents its overuse, meaning intelligent usage and short activations are required to avoid being left high and dry.
The guns on offer are a mostly pretty standard set, the game prioritizing you using guns in interesting ways rather than giving you anything too outlandish for your arsenal. You’ve got an assault rifle, a heavy machine gun, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher for your basics as well as some standard and EMP grenades, the player only able to carry three guns but both grenade types. The game does throw in some new weapons of its own invention, a Disc Launcher that can lop off enemy limbs, the LFE that clears out weaker foes with a large plasma ball, the Lock-On Laser that launches lasers down on foes from above, and some DLC weapons that are hard to find but incredibly powerful. The shooting works well in conjunction with the time slowing mechanic and during regular play, and I can’t claim to have had any issues with targeting foes save when they were meant to be dodgy. One thing Vanquish does to make even the standard weapons a lot more interesting is introduce a gradual upgrade system. If you find ammo for a currently equipped weapon in the field and have full ammo already, it will instead gradually improve your weapon, with firepower and ammo capacity growing as you do this more and more. Sometimes you may even encounter an upgrade pick-up in the wild that will work on any weapon, and while the upgrades are slow-coming, the changes are noticeable. You end up having to decide whether you’d like to hang on to a gun to try and build it up or swap it out for something you find that either works better in the situation or has ammo. Ammo isn’t too rare and guns maintain upgrades even when they leave your person, but if you die, all your weapons get docked an upgrade point. Checkpoints are thankfully pretty generous and you won’t keep losing upgrades if you die in the same place repeatedly, so the upgrade system ends up being a nice addition to weapons that could otherwise grow old through too much use. You’re building up a better weapon rather than just falling back on what works.
One of the stranger things about Vanquish though is its scoring system. While it does have a start-to-finish story, the game tries to encourage replayability by showing you a point tally between stages. The screen displays numbers and percentages based on your actions, kills, ammo usage, how many friendlies died or were saved, and which collectibles you’ve found. Oddly, despite keeping count and presenting these things to you, the game doesn’t really seem to tell you how well you did. It keeps the player from feeling like they failed, but it also makes it hard to engage that secondary aspect of the game. It’s cool to see the data and try to improve, but the game does a poor job conveying what grants points during the level, a box on the side displaying messages about your points that are difficult to parse. Despite having a challenge mode to try and increase its longevity, engaging a scoring system where the goals are obfuscated too much isn’t too compelling, making it an odd quirk but nothing that will completely turn you off to the main game.
THE VERDICT: Vanquish is an advancement of your typical cover shooter, the game pushing its gameplay into the future just like it did its setting. It could have done with going much further and making the world more conducive to the style of play it introduces to you, but the shooting is still heavily improved by these simple yet deep additions. The story is absurd and beats its points in too hard, but it sets up some amazing setpieces and enjoyably absurd situations that complement the energetic gameplay well.
And so, I give Vanquish for the PlayStation 3….
A GREAT rating. Vanquish rushed into new territory for the shooting genre, but just like its hero, it had a few too many things in its path to reach its potential. The cover shooter gameplay is still a bit basic if you don’t engage the dashing and time slowing, but the weapon upgrade system and a few new devices means it at least has something to hold you between the insane flips and intense action scenes. For a short experience it reuses some things a bit too much, but the areas stay fresh and exciting. You’ll never become complacent as you must always stay on the move and keep aware of the situation. Vanquish gives you that action movie feel, even including scenes where you hammer a button to make your character pull off insane attacks to further push that feeling. Delightfully cheesy at times and indulging in absurdity instead of trying to hinge on realism, Vanquish makes a sci-fi shooter that would be a wonderful base for something more but still stands as an incredible high-speed shooting experience.
While I still couldn’t tell you why it’s called Vanquish, I can recommend this sci-fi shooter that fully embraces both halves of that genre name.