Game: Vanquish Publisher: SEGA Developer: Platinum Games Genre: Third Person Shooter/Bullet Hell Price: $59.99 Verdict: Definitely Check This Out Pros: Super slick looking, Fast action, Gi-normous set pieces, Tons to shoot. Cons: Can get a bit overwhelming, Plenty of ways to die, The “Story”
Vanquish, not surprisingly, is brought to you by the same folks that did Bayonetta last year for the 360 and PS3. It is a title that will be known for many things most assuredly it’s shooting as well as it’s strange “knee-sliding” maneuver.
Set in the distant future, Vanquish is a story involving overpopulation, an energy crisis, and Russians. Yup apparently in the future the Russians are again a threat. Energy is so scarce in the future that the US has launched it’s own satellite into space in an attempt to relieve it’s own dependence on foreign sources. Sounds familiar huh? Well the Russian government has just been overthrown by a extreme nationalist Victor Zeitsev, and he has then taken over the satellite. However instead of using it to power his country, he diverted the energy to basically melt San Fransisco. Zeitsev then issues an ultimatum to the US President, Surrender your country or I start destroying major cities and New York is next (isn’t it always).
In Vanquish you play DARP agent Sam Gideon. You are sent in by the President along side a special forces team headed up by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Burns. Burns, needless to say, isn’t happy with having a government lackey on his team, and this is basically their relationship throughout the game. However you aren’t just some space marine sent out to battle, no. You wear a special prototype armor called an Augmented Reaction Suit or ARS for short. The ARS is directly connected to your muscles and nervous system in order to heighten your level of reaction speed as well as your strength and dexterity. Your ARS suit allows you to enter a sort of “bullet time” slow-mo upon your command or when you have taken damage to a critical level. You also have a fast travel type of movement that is accomplished by sliding on rocket propelled knees around the area. Also you can smoke. Not to mention that you look bad ass.
Along your destructive path to victory, you will fight many different types of enemies. Some are your run of the mill grunt robots (did I mention there are Russion robots?) some larger AT-ST type walkers and down right giant bipedal transformer type gigantic mechs (“Metal Gear?”). Each have their own style of fighting you, which you need to adjust to in order to find their weak point and destroy them. Most of the time your fellow soldiers are just there as cannon fodder and don’t really help, there is even an audio clip that Sam will say when aiming telling them to get out of the way.
What Vanquish does really well is give you the sense of scale. During one of the first larger battles, literally a space ship comes within feet of crashing right on your head. It definitely makes you take a second and admire the set pieces your are fighting in or around. But don’t take too long however because the shooting is very fast and at times quite overwhelming. This is the closest I have ever seen to a third person shooter nailing top down “bullet hell” style of game play. It creates havoc on the battlefield for the player, and really forces you to pay attention to what is going on in all directions and asses your targets accordingly. There isn’t much in the way of tactics aside from distracting enemy robots with a lit cigarette, but who cares. You get to blow shit up, and lots of it.
There isn’t any multiplayer involved in this game, but I am not sure how it would even be handled if it were. There is so much going on on screen now, if you put a couple players in it at once your system would implode. There are some challenge maps, which I did not get into yet. My guess is that they involve some sort of either timed destruction or possibly a “Horde Mode” type of wave combat.
Vanquish is a hell of a lot of fun to play, it’s even fun to watch, really. It’s no surprise that this is from the same people that did Bayonetta. In fact I have described it to friends as “Bayonetta with a dude, and robots instead of angels.” Not sure how they could, or if they even want to progress this story past one game. But I am very interested to see where they take this type of title in the future.
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