This is a game that really surprised me. People who know me know that I hate modern TPS. They’re just not fun with their “get in cover, get out to shoot stuff, get back in cover” style of gameplay that’s just all sorts of boring. But, when I played the demos for Vanquish, I fell in love with it.

The fast action, not needing to constantly be in cover, and various fun gameplay mechanics made the demo a very fun experience, and hyped me up for the full version of the game.

Read on and see if I liked it as much as I anticipated!

Developer: Platinum Games
Publisher: Sega
Date of Release: October 19th
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360

Genre: Third-person shooter/Action
Rated M for Mature

What is good about this game
Presentation
It’s not brown! That’s probably the second most surprising thing about this game. It has a lot of whites, a good amount of reds and blues, some orange, some green in some parts and other colors in there. The only time there’s really any brown is when there’s dirt and such. The actual graphic quality is actually pretty good. The character models are well done. The environments are really nice. You’ll see that the textures aren’t incredibly high-quality if you look from really close-up, but they look fine otherwise. The visual style, while going for a realistic look, still has quite an anime feel to it with that weird space suit that moves and morphs in an anime-ish fashion and the intense action scenes are definitely anime mixed with badass action films. The cinematics are really nice and fun to look at.

Oh, and no “lag”/slow-down, ever, even during the craziest parts of the game (other than the suit’s powers, off course). That’s just awesome considering how much can go on at once.

Fast-paced gameplay that doesn’t concentrate on cover
One thing I hate about modern TPS is that they’re so boring and slow.  You’re walking or running slowly, going from cover to cover, shooting everything in front of you, going out of cover, going to the next cover, rinse and repeat for the whole game. Here, it throws that out of the window here, providing with really fast-paced gameplay with the boosters you have that let you rocket around the battlefield, you have tons of enemies shooting at you, and, most importantly, taking cover isn’t as important here as it is in other TPS. Yes, you CAN take cover, but it’s not as all-powerful as it is in all other TPS.  Some enemies blow up cover, or even shoot through it, so you have to actually avoid attacks. As proof of that, my first playthrough of the game had me using cover 0.53% of the time, which equals to a bit over 2 minutes total in 5 hours of gameplay (most of which I have because some missions start you in cover). It changes a bit on harder difficulties, but the normal mode basically doesn’t require using cover much.

Rather than relying mostly on cover, you have a special time slow-down power built into the suit. If you get enough damage, time slows down so you can get out of harm. Otherwise you can slow down time manually by taking aim while dodging, or while boosting on the ground, or various other actions, which also takes from your energy meter. If your energy meter is ever empty, it overheats and you have to wait a little while before being able to use it again. The whole slowdown system has a nice “risk vs reward” system built into it, which I love. “Should I use my bullet-time now especially since my energy meter is so low, or do I way a bit and risk dying”. Love this stuff. When you’re really trying for high scores/low times, your use of slow-down should be even more limited since using slow-down means taking more time to complete a level. To add to that, you also have a melee attack that, when used, uses up all of your energy meter. I like that you get different melee attacks depending on what weapon you have equipped (the one with the disc launcher doesn’t use up your energy meter), including one that gives you a counter-attack, and a dash attack if you boost while pressing the melee attack button. Cool stuff, but be careful since they overheat your suit.

Basically, I love that it plays a lot like an action game with shooter elements, rather than just a boring cover-based shooter.

Scoring system
Now THAT’S awesome. A modern game, a TPS at that, with a scoring system? How cool is that? You get points for kills, for certain types of kills like head shots or other special kills, points for finishing missions fast enough, and point penalties for dying. There are various ways to get more or less points, and finding faster routes and ways not to die, so it’s always fun to go through the game. The variety of enemy types require some trial and error to find out the best way to kill each of them effectively and getting the maximum amount of points which is cool. The more points you get, the higher you get on the leaderboards.

The simple fact that it has a scoring system and online leaderboards give this game near infinite replay value since the gameplay is so good.

Challenge
While the normal mode is all sorts of easy, dying can still happen fairly frequently since you don’t have a lot of health and it regenerates slowly. Then there’s extra difficulties which up the strength of enemies quite a bit, as well as making their AI a slight bit better. And, if that’s not enough, there’s the challenge mode, which pits you against waves and waves of enemies, forcing you to retry the whole thing if you die.  If you want challenge, there’s a fair bit of it here.

What might annoy people in the game
Story
The story is… kinda crap. The characters aren’t very interesting other than Burns… and Elena (for other reasons ;p), the overall plot is just about as simple as it gets, just being “Russians are attacking the US, you must stop them” and not going much deeper than that. No big plot twists, just very straightforward and simple. Not that this is a big problem to me, I always find that video game plots should never try to over-shadow the gameplay and I love that this doesn’t try too hard plot-wise and keeps it simple. But if you like a good plot in a game, don’t expect too much from this one.

Short
If you’re in the game just to get to the end and then stop playing, you’ll be disappointed since it’s really short. Less than, say, MW2, since the gameplay is actually satisfying here, but still sort of disappointed that it’s over so fast. Your first playthrough, unless you suck even more than I do at the game, will last you just a bit over 5 hours (not counting the skippable cinematics), maybe less depending on how good you are/how much you die (so your times will go down as you replay the game). BUT, if you go in thinking of it as a more “arcade-style high score” game, you’ll be happy that it’s not too long so competing online for high scores will not be really tedious.

To me it’s the perfect length (heck, I could even argue that it’s a bit too long) for this type of game, especially since the story is less than stellar, so it really concentrates on the awesome gameplay/replay value.

Dying penalties
While you get a point penalty when you die (which you should avoid doing if you’re going for the leaderboards), when you’re just going through the game for the first time (or even a few subsequent times to learn the levels properly), dying really isn’t a bad thing, at all. Your ammo gets filled up and you keep most of your upgrades on your guns(you never lose a full upgrade, just a point that goes toward said upgrade). Unless you’re going for the leaderboards, playing the challenges or playing on God Hard mode, the game will be fairly easy since dying isn’t really a bad thing.

What is bad in the game
QTEs
I’m not gonna dwell on the subject too long, but QTEs suck, and they’re here for some reason, so that’s not a good thing. For most of the game they make very small and sometimes even optional appearances (only triggered by destroying certain parts of certain enemies), but the final gameplay sequence is a bunch of QTEs. Weak. The base gameplay here is superb, there’s no reason whatsoever to resort to using QTEs.

Overall
This is the only TPS this generation that I played that I actually enjoyed. I mean, I sorta liked Splinter Cell Conviction but it suffered from the “cover-based shooter” syndrome, and Uncharted 2 was very pretty and had a fun story/characters but it wasn’t really fun to play. No TPS has really offered an actual fun gameplay experience like Vanquish has. I haven’t played every TPS this generation, but, as it stands, this is by far the best I’ve played, nothing in the genre has been anywhere near this good.

It’s fast, it’s fun, it has huge replay value, and it offers a good challenge on higher difficulty levels/challenge mode. You can’t ask for much better in regards to TPS this generation.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Scoring system with online leaderboards means HUGE replay value
- It’s fast and fun to play
- Isn’t brown
- No online (which means the single-player isn’t dumbed-down to accommodate a crappy tacked-on multiplayer)
- Offers a good challenge, especially on the harder difficulty levels, those will kick your ass

Cons
- No unlockables, this would have been a great games to have some cool unlockables
- It has QTEs
- AI allies and certain environments (like tall grass) can get in the way of the camera (especially allies, they ALWAYS get in your way) which is annoying

The Save Factor
The game costs 60$. If you plan on climbing the leaderboards, it’s well worth it, otherwise rent it since it’s fairly short for a single playthrough. Or it will probably go the way of Bayonetta and get super cheap in a few months, so you could just wait a bit. Either way, if you want a game with lots of replay value, this is well worth it.

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, xbox 360