Japanese games and I don’t have the best relationship. I think that they have too much going on in the story and have too much of a gap between actual gameplay. There are exceptions to this rule in the form of companies like Platinum Games who seem to just get to the hack and slash. While I do love everything from Platinum that I have played I wasn’t really sure how to react when I heard they had made a cover shooter. Let’s see how that goes.

Story:

The Order of the Russian Star, the new dictators of Russia think it would be a good idea to take control of an inhabited satellite and use it to blow up San Francisco. Since they obviously don’t watch movies or play that stupidly popular shooter from Activision they think it would be a good idea to threaten the New York unless their demands are met. In response the US sends their full military might into space to take back the station.

Keeping the military forces company is a DARPA operative and all round dude Sam Gideon, who has to save a scientist named Dr. Candide. To help him get the job done, he has an experimental suit that can create weapons from its memory, heal its user and slow down time.

The story is one of the most generic stories I have come across in recent times.

Sound:

The sound is really good.

The weapons sound like what you would expect and more, the guns sound right according to class especially the heavier ones. Turrets and walkers sound really heavy like they will destroy everything in their wake.

The rocket powered butt sliding actually does sound like a rocket though I do wonder where the fuel is stored. The suit’s core when overheated sounds like it will go boom if it gets any hotter and has this electrical like sound when it’s back to functional temperature. The footsteps and doors sound right as well. Explosions sound AWESOME!

The voices on the other hand are a weak point, while the voice actors are good and the lines are delivered decently the writing falls flat making what might have been great performances really poor and quite often silly.

The background music though drowned out by the action while not great isn’t bad. It’s an instrumental score that feels alright and helps to set the mood

Graphics:

Unlike most cover shooters, the colors in Vanquish are not washed out. You can tell each color apart clearly and the world is bright with each of them. There is no darkness here except for one section in a tunnel. A great point of note is that each weapon that you can pick up has a bright colored border around it making it easily noticeable.

The character models are well done but they lack variation. Each friendly and enemy units except those that are important to the story look the same but I do like the effects when bullets bounce off them and when a bullet hits them in slow motion which is really cool. Another nice effect is that when you hit an enemy they all give out electrical sparks (since they are robots) which is a really clear signal that you got a hit.

The generator on Sam’s suit is always up to something and looks good doing it. From the brownish effect when it is overheated and cooling to the blue flash when it is back down to functional temperatures are really nice. They have little particle effects that are quite nice. The only problem I have is the red when you take too much damage. Unlike some games where it is overbearing, it is not so bad here but still annoying.

Speaking of particle effects, they are well done too. From gun fire to pattern based explosions they are all really nice. A point of mention is the bubble effects you occasionally see and are really cool, they seem like a shock wave. Even the lights look nice and do a good job of telling you where they are looking right now.

Gameplay:

Vanquish is strange gameplay wise. From the get go it tries to be a cover shooter and tells you to take cover but each time you do it makes sure you die. The only way to avoid death is to keep moving. In most cover shooters you move from cover to cover but Vanquish makes you leap out of cover and shoot in slow motion before you can land and then rocket power your way to the next cover which makes for some really hectic fire fights especially since your mostly outnumbered.

When fighting you can take to cover to hide yourself, you can leap out and go into bullet time to get a few easy shots in. You can butt slide to outpace enemies and take them out. The problem is that all this causes heat and if you over heat you have to wait for the suit to cool off before you can do any of that again. All that is really cool but one mistake the game design made is that if you take too much damage you go into bullet time that you cannot turn off until the suit over heats which breaks the momentum a lot, so you take cover and just wear it out while killing anyone who has a shot at you.

While most enemies are cannon fodder some are a little larger and shoot deadly shots at you making you focus on them and then the rest. There are even bigger enemies but these guys are interesting, while you could kill them by filling them with holes you can also shoot out their missiles when they are just launched hurting them significantly. This gives a good variation in enemies and tactics.

To add to confusion are the bosses. While most are cannon fodder little dinks that you can shoot the head off, sometimes you go up against huge robots that are 10 times your size, to defeat them you blow out their limbs and aim for their core. These guys send out tons of missiles and grenades at you so you need to dodge them while still managing to hurt them. When striking at the core, electric pulses are fired out that need to be dodge as quickly as possible so that you can get back to shooting at them. These make for some really great reactionary boss fights. The choice of tactics here is fun too, you can either take cover and hurt them a bit at a time or rocket power butt slide your way around them to keep them on their toes.

When the game puts all these enemies together you get some really nasty firefights where you need to choose who to pick off so that the friendlies get a chance to fight. You might attack a heavy or a grunt who has control of a turret to reduce the fire against you and your men or go for the big guys, either way you’re thinking and that is something very few cover shooters offer.

Another cool system is the weapons. Your suit can store 4 weapons at a time and you can switch to any of them. If you find another weapon from the list that you are carrying around you get more ammo from it, if you have full ammo you get an upgrade point, get enough of these points and your weapons gets an upgrade like more ammo, damage, less lock on time and so on. These weapon drops can usually be found in boxes or weapon stores, but you can also get them by saving wounded alleys who sometimes drop full upgrades. I really like this system since it makes you weigh the value of each weapon.

Vanquish also has a few interesting sections like riding a gun boat which aims along with you against enemies who are on the ceiling and other sections that make you run for the end.

Conclusion:

Vanquish may not have any semblance of a good story but it more than makes up for it with hectic gameplay that occasionally makes you think. It’s fast and fun, that’s all that a game should be and Vanquish does it well. While short it does a lot to make cover shooters more fun and I do hope for a sequel

Final Score: 8/10