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Written by Oliver on Sunday 14 Nov 2010
Platinum Games was in real danger of releasing two serious ‘Game of the Year’ contenders in 2010, with Bayonetta earlier this year, and now Vanquish, the developer’s latest game.
Featuring at least a few new game mechanic tricks and a heap of gameplay refinements, Vanquish is at its heart a third-person cover-based action shooter in the same vein as Gears of War, only once you’ve seen all there is to see in Vanquish, and you’ve carved your way through every combat encounter you’re challenged with in this game, Gears of War’s gameplay situations will seem extremely tame in comparison.
Even during the tutorial I was shaking my head in disbelief at the insane abilities you have access to in Vanquish, and my eyes glazed over thinking of the possible gameplay scenarios to come – pure craziness was sure to ensue!
Not… quite.
I won’t deny that Vanquish includes insane battles with extreme amounts of visual insanity exploding all over the screen, but despite the fun of the core shooting gameplay matched with excellent levels that enable some memorable enemy encounters, the developers don’t do enough to fully exploit what’s unique about their game and unfortunately leave it to the player to have fun in their world, rather than manually renew and refresh the experience with effective pace changers and original challenges.
San Francisco has just been destroyed following a terrorist attack on the part of a new Soviet (READ: Not Russian) coalition called the Order of the Russian Star. Naturally, this group is demanding that the United States surrender so that Russia may reap scarcely available resources on Earth, or else another city will be obliterated – next time it will be New York!
Complicating matters is the existence of a vast space station (the size of a large city) orbiting Earth which is currently used to harvest and store solar energy. While this stored energy can be extremely useful as an alternative source of fuel for a resource-famished Earth, its power can also be devastating. It’s this power that was used to destroy San Francisco in the first place, and now that the Order of the Russian Star has forcefully taken control of the space station with its army of robotic soldiers and mechanical fiends, the group plans to use the station’s awesome power as it pleases.
Given the United States’ stance on negotiating with terrorists (i.e. it doesn’t), a special task force is sent in to retake the space station before New York City is destroyed. This team is lead by a war-veteran by the name of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Burns, as well as the protagonist of Vanquish, Sam Gideon.
Gideon is given access to the Augmented Reaction Suit, or ARS, which is an all-in-one battle ready combat suit that can, with a little training, turn anyone into a one-man army.
With the ARS, Gideon is able to take advantage of superhuman reflexes (represented by slowing down time in game), the ability to rocket-slide around environments (handily getting him out of tight encounters in no time), and perform an extremely powerful series of melee attacks (that basically annihilate normal enemies in one go).
In addition, Gideon has a special weapon called BLADE which is able to scan and recreate any weapons found in the field… although because this is a game, BLADE is only able to store three weapon designs at a time in memory, leaving Gideon to pick and choose between an array of armaments, including standard rifles, shotguns and missile launchers, as well as a brilliant laser lock-on gun, a rifle that fires an energy pulse, something that spits out giant, explosive spinning blades, and perhaps one or two other curiosities.
Rounding out the tactical armaments are two grenade types – a normal explosive and an additional EMP grenade, which will come in handy when trying to disable robotic enemies long enough to stick a shotgun in their bellies.
Dodging incoming attacks is made easy with the ‘dodge’ button, while hiding from enemy fire is accomplished by snapping to the nearest wall and using it for cover, much like Gears of War - from your hiding spot, you can lob grenades and pop out to shoot at those that would destroy you.
With access to this kind of weaponry and such an assortment of abilities, a common combat encounter would see you rocket-slide into cover to more easily survey the danger, maybe fire a few shots from your rifle or pick off enemies in the distance with your sniper rifle, before tossing out an EMP grenade at a group of robotic creatures rendering them incapacitated for a few seconds. Diving out of cover, you may choose to activate your reaction-time abilities to slow the scene down to a crawl, only to whip out a rocket launcher, leisurely aim your shot, and unleash a volley of explosives at your convulsing foes to make quick work of them.
Immediately, you jump out of slow-mo and slide forward a few metres to take a lone enemy by surprise, pulling off a combination of melee attacks to destroy it in one fluid motion. Another mob of robots rounds the corner with a bigger fiend in tow, and you devastate this collection of metal and circuits with an EMP and explosive grenade one-two combination, whittling their energy down and giving you time to run for the nearest cover. You activate slow-mo again and carefully line up vital targets, while taking full advantage of the time afforded you by rapidly firing off hundreds of rounds from your rifle, easily destroying any threat.
I really appreciate the fact that in Vanquish, you’re fighting hordes of robotic enemies, rather than humans – if your opponents were of the ‘flesh and bone’ variety, Vanquish would be an extraordinarily violent game with bullets ripping through viscera and crimson fluid spurting all over the place. That’s not to say that Vanquish doesn’t contain some… shocking events with a few gory scenarios, but minute-to-minute combat doesn’t include a single drop of blood.
Foul language is included, however, so… be aware of that.
Combat in Vanquish is made extremely satisfying with brilliant explosions and incredible visual/audio feedback to let you know (and ‘feel’) that your shots are making contact and having an effect of some sort, which is vital in a game where visual busyness is always at maximum capacity.
This combat ‘feel’ is made even better with the option to customise individual aiming sensitivity options for different situations – Normal (while running around), Aiming (when you’re manually aiming down your gun and over your shoulder) and Zoom (when you use a weapon with a scope, like a sniper rifle). So instead of having to get used to loose and imprecise aiming, you can immediately hit your targets with professional proficiency.
To help improve your range of armaments over time, Vanquish includes an interesting upgrade mechanic to increase the power and maximum ammunition count of a given weapon. If your weapon is at full ammunition, and you pick up another weapon of that type, you’ll rank that weapon up by one level. Do that enough times and you’ll progress its effectiveness. You’ll also be able to pick up upgrade icons to achieve the same effect, and if you focus your upgrade opportunities on a handful of weapons, you’ll be able to end the game with a super-powered arsenal of guns!
Now, Sam Gideon’s ARS is powered by a central energy source that’s used for most of the available actions that the suit can perform, save for shooting and using grenades (these are ammunition-based). So if you remain in slow-motion mode for too long (which can be triggered at any time), your energy will deplete and your suit will overheat. Similarly, rocket-sliding out of danger will slowly deplete energy, while performing that devastating melee attack will fully drain the meter.
Why is all of this worth mentioning? At the beginning of Vanquish, this heat meter is pretty restrictive, but I was under the impression that, as the game progresses, I might gain access to suit upgrades in order to loosen the restraints of a rapidly draining energy bar so that I may make further use of these awesome abilities. The thing is, these upgrades never came and throughout the journey there were times when the limitations became incredibly frustrating.
Obviously there’s a need to use these abilities strategically and ensure that you don’t deplete your energy meter (or else you’ll be left semi-helpless in the middle of a raging battle), but combined with the mentioned visual busyness, there are times when you’re simply overwhelmed with what’s happening on-screen to the point where strategy flies out the window.
I believe that you never receive suit upgrades because the difficulty curve in Vanquish is very gentle – a good incline with a spike or two here and there just to give you a good challenge, but gentle. The abilities you start the game with are the abilities you end the game with, and with the exception of upgraded weaponry, your own personal combat prowess will be much the same once the credits roll as they were two hours into the game. This is a problem, because it basically means that you’ll be doing the same routines over and over again, with nothing new or fresh introduced to help mix up the gameplay.
New enemies are brought in, sure, but combat strategy hardly differs from one opponent to the next, while even boss characters (of which there are very few) are re-introduced into battle as regular enemies. Despite the fact that the core combat ‘loop’ is incredibly (amazingly) fun, six hours of even the best-designed gameplay will always get stale… also much like Gears of War.
But you know what never gets stale in Vanquish? The visuals and the huge (enormous, gigantic, colossal) set-pieces presented in both the cutscenes and in-game. Environments in Vanquish are massive and awe inspiring, but even the smallest graphical details are included for your on-the-ground inspection. Combat, too, suffers not a bit from these vast play spaces as levels have been expertly designed to allow for memorable, intense and tight firefights.
Sometimes, these environments and set-pieces are a little too overwhelming, however, with visual complexity rivalling most any bullet-hell shooter as a result of hundreds of laser streams and bullet-tracers, dozens of explosions, lots of jostling on-screen movement, and more - during an especially severe battle, this can get quite disorientating and more than once I needed to find cover to catch a breather!
Once I had finished Vanquish, I was definitely disappointed that the game felt so brief – six hours may be enough to weave an epic yarn filled with heroic characters, dastardly villains, unique settings and experiences, and dozens of fantastic set-piece scenarios, but Vanquish felt like it needed to be longer – the game ends just as the story is really ramping up, no doubt in an effort to make rabid fans of what could easily be the next great franchise.
For me, though, this tactic may have backfired. Added to this is the feeling that developer Platinum Games didn’t fully exploit the game’s unique gameplay mechanics or carefully pace the rate of progression by providing players with new and enhanced abilities throughout the adventure. As mentioned, the abilities you begin Vanquish with are the abilities you end the game with, which leads to its repetitive nature.
Vanquish – repetitive or not, brief or not, exploited or not – is a thrilling, action-packed journey through some of the most insane third-person combat scenarios you’ll witness in a videogame, and contains an element missing from a swathe or new titles that have been released over the last year – an element of raw, unadulterated fun!
The actions that you can perform and the ways in which you get to try your abilities are so crazy, you can’t help but laugh and smile at the sheer lunacy of it all. Despite the fact that I found the game repetitive and padded in places, I can’t wait until enough time has passed for me to forget what’s possible in Vanquish, just so that I can do it all over again!
So while Vanquish isn’t quite a serious contender for ‘Game of the Year,’ it’s at the very least a contender. Action fans will thoroughly enjoy it!
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