Developer: PlatinumGames
Director: Shinji Mikami
Writers: Hiroki Kato, Jean Pierre KellamsShinki Mikami left Capcom after directing God Hand. His seventh game as a director is his first and only title for PlatinumGames — a shooter which reuses some ideas from his fourth game as a director, the commercial failure P.N.03, as well as taking influence from the anime Casshern (both involve humans battling robots). I didn’t review P.N.03 or God Hand on account of neither being available for PC, so this is the only non-horror title I’ll be reviewing from Mikami. Vanquish is a far cry from Resident Evil and Dino Crisis — it’s a highly linear 3rd person squad cover shooter in a futuristic war setting which fits quite nicely with the rest of the Platinum catalogue.
To be quite honest, this style of game really isn’t my sort of thing, but I can’t deny that I was having a blast by the end. It undeniably accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is delivering fast-paced dumb fun. The plot is a bit of send-up of American action movies — a gruff-voiced, chain-smoking, augmented-reaction-suit-wearing (read: bullet time and regenerating health) DARPA agent named Sam Gideon battles Russian robots on a pretty cool looking cylindrical space colony. Russian separatists used the space colony as a weapon to destroy San Francisco, and now Sam has to stop them from using it to destroy New York. He is assisted on the field by an equally gruff-voiced draconian Marine Colonel named Robert Burns and his company of Marines. Another DARPA agent, Elena Ivanova, provides him with extra information and assistance via comms. The writing is terrible, but seemingly intentionally so — the dialogue is periodically self-aware, featuring lines like ‘This is starting to sound like a bad video game’. I think it would have been more effective if it had played up the ridiculous and comedic side of things a little more — as is, the story is pretty much just there to fill space between gameplay bits.
The game’s central mechanic (and most influential, as it was widely imitated after) is a sliding boost, allowing the player to traverse the levels at extremely high speeds for short amounts of time. Aiming while sliding activates bullet time mode, which also automatically activates when the player’s health is low, allowing them to more easily destroy whoever is killing them. The suit overheats after using bullet time or slide boosting for too long, leaving the player vulnerable to attack and needing to seek cover. However, cover objects are often easily destroyed by the enemy, and the player’s score is penalized for using it with a time-based score deduction. The player can only carry 3 weapons at once (though there are ample opportunities to switch weapons in the environment, and the available arsenal is vast and diverse and can be upgraded, quite unlike Mikami’s early titles). The player is also tasked with acting as a medic for Bravo squad and is rewarded with weapons and ammo upon saving someone. The combination of all these mechanics makes Vanquish’s gameplay extremely fast-paced, frantic, and chaotic. The game is most enjoyable when it throws a boss at you in combination with hordes of enemies for maximum chaos, as it does frequently towards the end.
It’s a brief game (my play time came in just under 6hrs), which is a good thing — it’s so fast paced that it works better in small doses and doesn’t feel designed for binging. There is a little bit of extra content to stretch out the value, however. The game is split into 5 acts, each of which has multiple missions. Completing each act unlocks a tactical challenge — basically a time trial type arcade mode of very high difficulty. Beating the whole game unlocks ‘God Hard’ mode. If that’s not enough for you, there are rumors that a sequel is currently in development — the ending is prime sequel bait, after all.
The PC version is quite well optimized and features loads of graphics settings to tweak, including an option to run at 60fps. Apparently using this framerate in the launch PC version caused enemies to deal increased damage, but this bug has since been fixed. Even on high settings, the game looked a bit washed out and consoley to me, but perhaps it’s because I was streaming it off a cloud and one of the settings was wrong. Still, while the visuals are not the flashiest in the world, the art design is often quite cool thanks to the novel setting. There isn’t a huge amount of variation in the enemy design, but the game is short enough that it doesn’t become monotonous on that front. There bosses were especially well designed, and some of the fights were quite creative.
RATING: 7.5/10 scorpionbots
[Originally posted in 2018]
