Vanquish

I picked up Sega’s Vanquish a little while back for 19.99. I had my eye on it since I first heard about it. The games director is Shinji Mikami who also directed Resident Evil 4, and it’s for this reason that I was looking to purchase this game new (also because it came with a cool collectors figurine!) Regardless, I ended up choosing NOT to purchase Vanquish at launch and instead waited for the price to drop… which didn’t take long. But I’m glad I did! Not that this game is “bad” per se, but I would be a little upset if I paid 60 buckaroonies on it.

Spoilers will be in RED

Let’s start off a run down of what the game is. Vanquish is a 3rd person shooter that takes place in the (near?) future. The USA has built an enormous space colony thing in order to harbor excess sunlight to use as energy for the people back on Earth. Honestly, most of the story went over my head and I either wasn’t paying attention or they did a bad job of explaining it. But when I do know is that the Russians took over the space station and used its energy as a weapon by destroying San Francisco. The president (who looks very similar to Hillary Clinton) sends a retired and very grumpy Lieutenant Colonel Burns up to the station to take out the evil Russian group that is led by a creepy, flamboyant bald guy. Oh, and Sam’s there too. That who YOU play as!
Sam is from DARPA which is a science and research organization. He’s got a badass suit that not only looks cool, but gives him some sweet abilities. Burns doesn’t like Sam very much because… well, idk. Sam’s mission is actually different from Burns and his men. A scientist from DARPA has also been kidnapped and is on the space colony for some reason, so Sam is sent up there to not only assist in killin’ Russians, but also finding and returning this scientist guy.
Anyway, Sam’s suit is badass, aside from the fact that it has a visor of the mouth and not the eyes. Basically all of the art in this game is nice. It’s probably the games most redeeming quality. Everything fits together well and looks great! (except for Burns’ beard… that thing’s a little iffy) The military forces are easily distinguishable from the enemies, which is always nice. The levels also feel very large even though you are pretty much always confined. It’s really well done.
The enemies are all robots. This is cool because it gives you the ability to use weapons like EMP grenades that makes them all spaz out and leaves them open for attack. Robots are also cool because you can end up fighting some really ridiculous shit. And this game has a variety of crazy shit. It goes from giant mechs with drill arms that can burrow underground and pop up underneath you, to giant piles of scrap metal that flows around like Morpha from Ocarina of Time. You have to dodge its lasers and cut it down to size before attacking its red eyeball. I was very pleased with the diversity of enemies in this game, but the only downside was that they were reused a lot. Every mini boss you would end up fighting at least twice, and later on you’ll have to take on 2 or more of the same thing. And bosses were pretty much the same machine over and over which is the giant spider from the demo that turns into a walking mech. I believe you fight that thing 3 or 4 times...
Speaking of variety, there is a good variety of weapons as well. But while I admire the creators making some crazy weapon ideas, I pretty much just stayed with the same 3: assault rifle, heavy machine gun, and sniper rifle. Since you can upgrade weapons, I didn’t really feel like dropping the weapons I had for new ones when I worked to upgrade the ones I had. I wasn’t punished for this though, I was just left feeling like I could have done more. Anyway, some of the crazier weapons are a disc shooter and a gun that fires a slow moving pulse of energy that will push back anything in its path (as long as it’s not too far away). So there’s some cool stuff. The animations for changing weapons is also cool. Instead of the typical “reach behind your back and pull out a new weapon”, In Vanquish, your gun “transforms” into whatever you select. It’s pretty sweet. Something annoying is how whenever I picked up a weapon, regardless of what it was, San would utter “not what I was looking for, but it’ll do.” I still haven’t found the exact weapon he was looking for. WHY CAN’T I PLEASE YOU, SAM!?!
Most of the dialog in this game was pretty corny. I’m not sure if that’s what they went for (kind of like how Metal Gear Solid’s corniness has become a staple for that series) but I just found it to be a little off putting. And the morals they tried to work in were very repetitive and forced. Numerous times in the game, Lt. Burns would leave his men behind to die either to save his own ass or because “they knew what they were signing up for.” Sam would then yell at him for being so inconsiderate. Basically this same scene happened over and over game for the duration of the game. And speaking of men dying, no matter how many times Burns left his men behind to die, dwindling the numbers of their platoon, their numbers would always somehow increase for the next mission, which was convenient, but kind of missing the point of its own logic.
The meat of this game is its fast paced action. It’s what sets it apart from other games of its genre. You can shoot, but you can also use your suits powers to zip around in a rocketed knee slide, slow down time in a sort of “bullet mode” and punch the living fuck out of shit. The only bad thing is, your powers are limited. You can pretty much knee slide for however long you want, but if you have to take a break every few seconds or the suit will overheat. The same with bullet time and with melee attacks as well. You can get about 1 hit in and the game will drag it out into a combo and your suit will go down. It sucks because when it overheats, you can’t do shit. You can shoot and that’s all. When I played, my suit overheated a lot so I was basically a sitting duck (but I tend to play more of a laid back, cover based game anyway, so it wasn’t such a problem) But if you are going into this game hoping to just go hog wild and wreck some shop, think again. I can understand putting a cap on the suits abilities, but this game just seemed very restrictive. What makes it even worse is, THIS NEVER CHANGES! SPOILER ALERT: it is only in the very last fight that your suit gets upgraded to give you unlimited power, but the level is so densely packed with walls and pillars, you can’t really maneuver around to your full potential. And then when the fight is over, the games over, so it doesn’t even matter anymore anyway. If you pace your movements, you can probably avoid overheating, but a lot of the time it’s unavoidable.
Also, many of the “over the top” action sequences were designated to cut scenes or quick time events, which made me feel gypped. You spend the whole game confined to the few moves you can do, and all of a sudden the game takes over and pulls off all of these ridiculous stunts. Whack.
The end of the game is also somewhat of a gyp. I’m not sure if there are multiple ending or not (I don’t believe there are) but the whole thing was just very anticlimactic. Possible SPOILERS: Nothing really every comes of anything. There are some double crosses (fucking Burns even does a triple cross or some shit! That guy was a nut) The final boss isn’t even the main Russian bald guy! You fight him once in the middle of the game and he gets away. The final boss fight is basically 2 of him but they turn out to be remote controlled. You never even get to fight him! He’s still out there!! WTF!!?!
Vanquish is a cool game, I will admit. It was fun and gets pretty challenging (frustrating especially during the last few acts). I couldn’t even beat the whole game on Normal (Casual automatic is so much easier! :D) And at the end I unlocked God Hard! So like… if you love horribly difficult and frustrating games, this is probably something you want to pick up. It’s definitely a game for fans of shooters, that’s for sure. If you want it just for the fighting and powers, think again.

Pros:

Looks great

Runs great

Awesome enemies

Cool weapons

A level of difficulty comfortable for everyone

Cons:

Story is iffy

Anticlimactic

Suit overheats too fast

Intense action controlled by cutscenes