Vanquish: A Solid Shooter Let Down by Hype

I somehow managed to miss Vanquish’s original release for the seventh generation consoles – I’m very much into shooters and I like to think I’ve got a pretty wide breadth of knowledge when it comes to what’s coming out, but it slipped by me all the same.

Over the years I’ve had many people recommend it to me, almost always with the words “ridiculous,” “silly” or something along those lines coming up in the conversation. While at the time of its release PlatinumGames was still a fairly new studio, they had already released three games in their first year, including the critically lauded and moderately successful Bayonetta. Bayonetta was not my sort of game, and I had not enjoyed MadWorld all that much, so the studio’s name was not exactly a ringing endorsement for Vanquish.

Over time, a few people found a way to explain the game to me that made me more receptive – a cover-based shooter with emphasis on mobility and speed rather than hunkering down. A ludicrous romp through a colony space station taken over by evil Russians led by Space Putin and a robot army (their words, not mine). Much noise was made about the game’s trademark boost-assisted knee-sliding, which protagonist Sam Gideon uses in lieu of a sprint function to navigate the treacherous battlefields of the Providence space colony.

Over time, I developed a moderately high desire to check out the game, enticed by the idea of a fast-paced shooter where you could break a stalemate or push forward at any moment, turning a stop-and-pop firefight into a full frontal assault, or go from being pinned down by a machine gun to jetting thirty feet to the right and picking off the bewildered gunner in slow-motion. By this time though my Xbox 360 had gone the way of the dodo, and I had already moved on to PS4 and, primarily, PC as my gaming platforms of choice.

When Sega suddenly announced earlier this month that Vanquish would be coming to Steam with an unlocked framerate, 4K resolutions, all DLC and other various bells and whistles, all for $20, I decided it was time to finally check it out.

In lieu of a full review, I want to focus primarily on what specifically caused me disappointment despite my overall enjoyment of my six hours spent beating it on Normal. To be absolutely clear, I think that Vanquish is a fun game. It’s short enough that you can complete it in a few sittings, and it offers enough inventive scenarios and hammy anime-meets-western-sci-fi moments backed by some solid, responsive and frantic gameplay to keep you entertained for that timeframe.

My primary issues with the game concern the mobility mechanics and the story. Beginning with the latter, I felt like the game had a great premise for a fun, scenery-chewing sci-fi adventure; a devastating space super-weapon controlled by a bombastic, stereotypical Russian bad guy and the heroic, chain-smoking hot-shot American who saves the day alongside his short-skirt adorned female support character and the gruff, hilariously huge military commander he butts heads with, with plenty of explosions and large-scale battles along the way.

Instead, we get a story that is almost entirely from the POV of what the protagonist is doing, with few encounters with or cutaways to the villains or really anything going on outside the immediate progress of Sam and his unit’s campaign – the villain is encountered twice in-game and only shown in a few cutscenes, adding up to very little screen-time. While sensible in that the protagonist (and the player) only knows what is going on with his unit and his part in the mission, it squanders what should be a more grandiose and engrossing tale, turning it instead into a fairly generic piece of military science fiction. There are no real characters outside of Sam and Lt. Col. Burns, the aforementioned huge guy and commander of the marines Sam is saddled with. Burns grows tiresome very quickly – Steve Blum is a great voice actor, but his gravel and roughness are constant and grating, and the repetitiveness of Burns’ interactions with Sam gets old as they continuously clash over whether to sacrifice scores of men for the sake of the mission.

This conflict is in the service of some later developments, but without any other named and fleshed-out marines to care about, coupled with said later developments, it ultimately feels like our time was wasted with all of this, especially when we’re ripped into walking-pace forced first-person conversations between battles as exposition is dumped and Burns and Sam yell at each other some more, with pre-rendered cutscenes doing more of the same as well. Military science fiction stories following a single small unit can and do work, but only if we have some personalities and names to follow; this game doesn’t have its Corporal Hicks, its Private Hudson, its Johnny Rico.

On the gameplay side of things, as I said before things are mostly great. The shooting and movement on mouse and keyboard is satisfying and mostly precise and, while the weapons don’t quite sound powerful enough, the sound itself is mixed well and each weapon is distinct, and the visuals make up for it, with clearly distinguishable and creatively-designed enemies and bosses that spark and break apart satisfyingly as you tear into them with your arsenal.

Ultimately, though, the game introduces most of its variety and new ideas very early on, and the game settles into a fairly standard and unchanging rhythm for the remainder. Bosses and regular enemy encounter configurations are recycled several times, often in more confined environments that limit the effectiveness of the one thing that is supposed to set the game apart – Sam’s suit and it’s maneuvering capabilities. This wouldn’t be a problem (rather a challenge to get creative with something you’ve previously used as a crutch) if it weren’t for the fact that your options with the suit are actually rather limited.

See, when I had had the game described to me and looked at videos online, I was given the impression that the boosters on the suit allowed for an amount of verticality and flexibility that is simply not present in the game. Invisible walls abound in every Gears-of-War-esque environment, making each encounter less of an “arena” and more of a cluttered mess. Bombing around in a jet-powered knee-slide while shooting robots in slow motion is undeniably fun and presents opportunities no other game does for flanking and breaking out of sticky situations, but the game falls well short of the potential this movement system has.

Everything from small drops to ladders and staircases are walled in by invisible walls and button prompts – every combat arena is deceptively linear, which you will quickly find out when you jet around a piece of rubble only to find yourself caught on air, awkwardly flipping to your feet in confusion before turning around and running back into the line of fire where the game wants you to be. Staircases can not be approached from the side and dropped down on to for a smoother, quicker descent and escape – you have to run straight at it or hit another invisible wall. Ladders and other quick ascents and descents are accessible only in very specific positions via button prompt – if there’s no prompt, you can’t get up onto or down from it.

The result is areas that look open at first, until you learn through trial and error that many elevated positions and apparent flanking routes are actually just set dressing. Coupled with a relatively short meter for these abilities that is, bizzarely, tied in with your melee as well (a single melee attack overheats your suit and blocks you from boost sliding or using slo-mo for quite a while), and the mobility system feels more like a gimmick of intermittent necessity – careful use of cover and abuse the non-powered rolling dodge ability are enough to get you through all but the hairiest of encounters.

Make no mistake, the sliding around is highly enjoyable while it lasts, and certainly comes in handy in the later boss fights especially, but I can’t help but feel that its inclusion and implementation is a little overhyped – I could envision a much more robust system in place here, and clearly the developers could too if Sam’s amazing stunts in the cutscenes are any indication. Cutscene power to the max!

Vanquish is a good game with some great ideas that aren’t quite there. If Platinum ever gets to do the sequel that they set up with the game’s cliffhanger, I would love to see them expand on the gameplay to fully realize the potential of their idea and create something truly special.