Well, this is a moment I was quite hyped for. Finally getting the play the demo for Vanquish. One part of me is very excited for this game, and then there’s the part of me that says “calm down, it’s probably just another bland TPS”. SURE, it’s being made by Platinum games, who made the incredibly badass Bayonetta, but, on the other hand, it’s a TPS with a cover system, which has pretty much never been really enjoyable to me (too slow, too easy, rarely actually any fun to play).

Me getting excited about a TPS is all sorts of weird. Almost as weird as me getting excited about an FPS. In both cases, I usually end up being disappointed (most recent example: Singularity… Please don’t suck Bulletstorm, PLEASE), and this is why I’m being VERY skeptical about Vanquish.

So does this game follow the blandness of most TPS, or is it actually good?

Read on and see!

What I liked

Well, let’s start with the big one first: The game is actually really damn good. That was a big surprise to me.

The actual gameplay is well done. Rather than the average “take cover and kill stuff when it shows up” gameplay of modern TPS, here you rocket around the battlefield, the pace of the gameplay is just awesomely fast. While you CAN take cover to fight, it’s not the best method, and it’s very slow. Just boosting everywhere killing anything that gets in your way is not only more efficient, but it’s a whole lot more fun. There’s a lot of different ways to handle each situation as well, which makes the experience as a whole really interesting. And there’s a fun little upgrade system for your weapons too, and the HUD is really well-done (showing tons of useful info). And there’s a scoring system! Very few modern games have that unless they’re shmups, and I love getting points. The grenades are good too since you can actually throw them a reasonable distance. Oh, and I like that you can carry 3 weapons and 2 types of grenades… Still not as good as carrying all of the weapons at once like in older FPS, but it’s better than just carrying 2. Very few complaints in regards to the basic gameplay.

I love boosting around the battlefield. It’s smooth, easy to do, and it’s not unlimited so you have to gauge your use of the thing. And every other power uses your boost meter too, which really requires you to do some fast decision-making.

The bullet-time here is actually really good. I thought it would just be a lame gimmick that just doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the gameplay, but in this case it’s fun to use and incredibly useful. You get the slow-down when you’re close to die which enables you to react better to surrounding attacks (but that depletes your boost meter so it’s not really that cheap). You can also slow down time during dodges, and during boosts as well, which has tons of great uses.

I like the visual style too. It’s not incredible, but it looks really well done. It’s not just brown and gray, there’s a good array of colors here (though there’s a lot of white…. but I’ll take that over boring/overdone grey-brown ruins any day). The animation is top-notch as well, everything is fluid and fun to look at, and nicely detailed too.

OH, and something that I’m pretty happy about here: while you have unlimited continues, you are actually penalized for dying. I love that. Most modern games hold your hand so much that dying is rarely a bad thing (and sometimes it’s a good thing). Here, you are scored for your performance through a level, and you lose a bunch of points if you die.

When I first saw the controls, I thought it was way too spread out and would be tough to use. After playing around for a few minutes, I barely had any trouble with the controls. A few hiccups here and there due to awkward things (like slowing down time while boosting, it’s kinda tough to do properly). A bit of practice and any veteran gamer should have little trouble playing this.

What I didn’t like

It has QTEs. QTEs suck. Though here you don’t need to do them to kill the boss (and hopefully none of the bosses will require QTEs to kill), so it’s not as bad as in some games. And you didn’t even have to activate the QTE against the boss at all, so you might not even see it at all. But still, using QTEs is weak gameplay design and shouldn’t be here, especially when the gameplay is as solid as it seems to be here.

I don’t like that melee attacks completely use up your boost meter. It’s just annoying. And the attacks themselves are pretty pointless despite being one hit kills on standard enemies, shooting is usually a better option (since it doesn’t fully deplete your boost meter).

There’s regenerating health. I understand why it’s there… I mean, enemies are relentless and you die really fast… But why not make the enemy a bit less relentless, and/or give you a life bar and give a few health packs from random enemies or hidden on the battlefield? That would be just as good, if not better. With the regenerating health, you can basically survive anything without trouble, which kills the challenge. A health bar would force you to try harder to survive. I don’t mind the system too much, I just think a health bar would be so much better.

The weapons kinda suck. Basically just the standard FPS/TPS selection. Assault rifle, sniper, slightly slower but stronger machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, etc. And the tutorial DOES show off the “Disc Launcher”, which seems awesome… I just hope the retail version has more original weapons like that.

And I don’t really like the music. Not “video game-y” enough.

Overall

After playing the demo, I’m quite excited to play the retail version. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that either. TPS are generally pretty boring games, with their “just stay in cover and you’ll never die” gameplay with barely any action going on (and, when they try to steer away from the cover gameplay, they usually fail heavily or make things needlessly hard because the game engine isn’t built for that). This, on the other hand, plays almost like an action game rather than a TPS, which is awesome.

The gameplay is fast, the visuals are great and complement the gameplay nicely, there’s barely ever any “lag” because there’s too much going on on-screen, and it’s just a total blast to play. And I like that the cover system is kinda secondary compared to the rest of the gameplay. Yeah, I do have a few minor problems with what I saw in the demo as you can see above, but they’re nowhere near game-breaking. The good MORE than outweighs the lame here.

So yeah… I’m not cancelling my pre-order on this one. Good job Platinum Games, you have done something I thought to be impossible: making a TPS I could actually enjoy. The world must be ending soon… (yeah, technically inFamous was also a TPS that I enjoyed, but that felt more like an action-adventure game to me…)

(Note: my fastest time through the demo was 7 minutes 16 seconds… getting pretty close to that 6 minutes 12 seconds the developers did)

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