Vanquish Review. Fast Paced, Grandiose Shooting Mechanics

Vanquish might just be the best shooter game to ever come out of Japan. If you don’t mind terrible voice acting and a storyline that never quite seems to play out solidly, Vanquish provides you with steroid-laced fun shooting and futuristic graphics that will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours.

Graphics: 5.0

Vanquish has scintillating visuals. Everything from the cut-scenes, the shape-shifting AR robot and character designs and the terrific boss battles all put this game on another level. The explosive combat scenes are spectacular, and everything moves so quickly you might not even get to notice a few dancing robots as you’re sending missiles and bullets at them. The electronic music in the background also serves the action well.

Gameplay: 4.5

This section would have gotten a perfect 5.0 if the campaign wasn’t that brief and the acting was done a little better. In the game, you control Sam Gideon, a DARPA agent who is armed with an Augmented Reaction Suit. The suit in AR mode can slow down time for you to evade attacks or launch offensives.

The game is set in a fictional Earth where Russian militants have taken over Moscow and attacked the solar energy driven generator in space, an alternative source of energy. The cut-scenes show a destroyed San Francisco, and the enemy threatens to demolish New York next. As Sam Gideon, you are tasked with infiltrating a station and destroying the Russian robots and bosses that are planning the next attack.

Your AR suit is equipped with super AI techs such as the ability to slow down time, enhanced melee capabilities including shape-shifting BLADE regeneration which replicates any weapon analyzed, and jet boosters. The BLADE system can only store three scans at any given time. Combat is mainly cover-based, and you can use the ARS to slow down time and launch an offensive or go on the defence.

Controls: 5.0

While there’s quite a lot happening at any given time on-screen, you’ll never feel worn out by all the action. Shooting is fast paced, but you can simply commandeer everything from movement to the time stops with the triggers. At some point, you’ll be moving at blazing speed, but you’ll never feel any loss of control, even when you use the sliding-boost mechanism. What I like best is how responsive shooting is to controller input.

Replay Value: 4.0

The game has a storyline which isn’t well implemented. The dialogue is corny, and there is little to no character progression throughout the game. However, the boss battles are brilliant, and the mechanics are years ahead of their time. You can blaze through the entire game in as little as five hours since the plot is quite short. The action and next-level graphics are what would keep me coming back to this game.

Conclusion

What Vanquish lacks in a solid storyline and character development, it makes up in awesome battles, giving you full control of a robot suit that can do amazing stuff. Some of the boss fights will leave you wondering how the developers managed to pull off such impossible movements on a console game. The action is fast-paced, so you won’t have time to think too much about how terrible the voice actors are.