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Vanquish : PS3
I first played Vanquish on someone else’s PS3 - something I don’t often like to do as it means I can’t settle in properly, and was immediately hooked. I’d tried desperately to get into Gears of War on the XBox and then suddenly here was a game in the very same vein which felt massively superior in every way. I sat like a stereotype teenager in darkness for a couple of days, stealing some playtime when I could to blast my way through this game and as soon as I got home found myself buying my own copy to play.
Of course, the way things are, my own copy sat on a shelf and collected a little dust as I went through all the other games I have reviewed since Christmas; I think Dead Space 2 came out and that was kind of that, but Vanquish still called to me and a few weeks ago I finally gave it the time it deserved, and what fun!
To a young gamer, Vanquish can fall between the cracks, looking as it does like any number of third person shooters on the market, but that young gamer is missing something vital, something which screamed at me from the very beginning and was solidly imprinted on my mind by the time I reached the third chapter: R-Type. For many years, I’ve quietly mourned the loss of the sideways scrolling shoot-em-up of which R-Type was undoubtedly king; the modern market and way of playing just don’t seem to have room for something so quintessentially two-dimensional, and yet, as I fought my way through the early levels of Vanquish, I couldn’t help but think ‘it’s back, R-Type is back’. Sure, you are not a spaceship, you don’t have a floating orb helping you shoot and shielding you where needed, you don’t power up your weapons by holding down the button, you are not in 2D and there are no floods of bullets where a single shot means death, but somewhere in the core of its gameplay, Vanquish is the spiritual successor to that amazing series of games that dominated arcades when I was a young teenager. For a lot of people in their late thirties, I should need to say little more to get them to rush out and pick this up for the ridiculously low price it seems to be available for, but for the rest of you, let’s continue with the review.
Vanquish is a third-person shooter which is all about big set piece boss fights. Sure, there are plenty of small robot bad guys to kill on the way, but they are fodder in a game which is filled with solid giant behemoths that require taking apart piece by piece. It is chaotic, brutal and fun, with screens which are rarely peaceful and only then because the developers have tried to tag a story onto the experience (unnecessary, and not very well executed, to be fair, you don’t care about the plot, you just want to know what the next big thing to kill is!). The action is constant, and at times difficult, but always enjoyable and within the confines of the game there are a few different ways to do each thing, from the blaze-on-in-shoot-everything idea, through to careful sniper shooting (yup, that’s what I did) and bits in-between. There’s a nice little weapon upgrade system which means it is actually a pain to die (which you do get to do fairly often) and a well-executed cover system which allows for some tactics during combat, plus they’ve tagged on a nice bullet-time-esque ability, which means it is possible to show your true skills by slowing down time and picking the robots apart with precision. As I mentioned earlier, there’s the edge of a plot involving Russians and some fun accents, but all that really matters is where the bad guys are.
In a lot of games, I find myself frustrated when the stupid boss fight occurs and you are forced to learn its moves and patterns in order to kill it, but when that happens in Vanquish, it’s just part of the main game; what would be a boss fight in another franchise is just a standard baddie here, and you learn to drop them with a relaxed finesse as if they were nothing. Importantly though, it’s not annoying because it is what you are sitting down aiming to do, rather than a break in your game, and that’s key to the fun. It’s all about the attitude.
I can’t finish this review without mentioning how impressive Vanquish is on the eye; it was one of the details which had me drawn in on first playing. Rather than changing guns, your weapon morphs into the chosen type and it is possible to be very entertained just by regular weapon switching, or by flicking your helmet on and off to have a cigarette… It’s all very metallic and silver-grey, but what the art team have done with that limited palette is appealing, and for a little while you do get to see *gasp* a tree or two!! It does look good though, and it sounds good and it plays well.
Vanquish isn’t the kind of game that is going to win awards in a modern world. It has a poor plot, repetitive gameplay and doesn’t feel that it brings anything really new to the table (although it refines quite a lot of ‘old’ very well). What it is, which is very rare in modern games, is the kind of game which’ll have you coming back for another go or two just to beat a score or to get another trophy or, and this is the best thing, because it is fun. You can jump in at any point and enjoy that bit, without feeling the need to play the game through or care about narrative. In that way, we come back again to R-Type and its ilk; Vanquish is a 2D side-scrolling shoot-em-up in 2011, and if you liked that kind of thing in 1991, you’ll enjoy it now.
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tekkani posted this
