"From today on, San Francisco will be blowing up. All over the world." (Vanquish Review)

 

       (Article title is a quote from Vanquish producer Atsushi Inaba) Right off the bat, I can say Vanquish is a much easier game to get into than Halo 3. Then again, Halo is acclaimed for its multiplayer and I tried to get into Halo's campaign.
If Vanquish had a good multiplayer component, it would easily blow Halo out of the water critically. But, we're not here to talk about what could have been.

       I think Vanquish will mostly be noted for the suits boost mechanic. This mechanic is triggered by activating thrusters somewhere on the suit, which forces you down and propels you forward at high speeds. This allows for speedy traversal and evasion. Boy, do you need to evade. Boosting causes your suit to overheat if it's limit is reached. When boosting, you're able to aim and shoot (which sends you into a temporary bullet time mode). These two actions work together seamlessly and, when pulled off, makes you feel like a bad ass. And that's pretty much what this game aims to accomplish: to make you feel in control with super human powers. It definitely succeeds.

       The combat is amazing in this game. I had trouble running and gunning (shooting without aiming down the sights), but they allow you to adjust the sensitivity, so it could be modified to fit your preferences. Aiming down the sights is the highlight here, though. One of the most satisfying feelings is aiming at the head of a robot and shooting its head off in a couple of shots, then moving on to the next. Oh ho ho, but that's a lot easier said than done. These robots (Gorgies, they're called) have a pretty well developed artificial intelligence, (when you're at a distance, they shoot as much as they can, tracing your movements with the nose of their gun and when you're at close range, they will slash you with the blade of their gun. Oh, and you'd better kill the Gorgies good, because if you leave them alive, even by the skin of their teeth, they will crawl towards you frantically and self-destruct next to you) not to mention there are hordes of them shooting at you at the same time. When I say hordes, I don't mean six of them. I'm talking about 10 or 15. Battle fields in Vanquish are filled with bullets whizzing through the air and, if you don't maneuver enough, you could be restarting the mission from your last checkpoint  in, about, ten seconds.

       But, fear not, there are cover areas that you can hide behind while waiting for your suit to cool down (or health to regenerate) after being drilled by numerous amounts of bullets. They also pull off the cover system rather well. I think it's because you know where you're headed when you dive into cover and not just yanking yourself into a random, inconvenient area. The combat does not become stale when cover is introduced, because 1: destructible cover. Self explanatory. 2: the enemy AI does not allow you to rest behind a cover for long; they will run over to you and jump over the cover to slash you from behind. Not only that, the larger robots will launch grenades behind the cover area, forcing you to jet out of there. 

       Enemies react quickly and if you're not behind cover trying to shoot at them, you'd better activate that bullet time. It will pull you out of some of the tightest situations, but it's limited and when you reach that limit, your suit overheats and you are a lot more susceptible to critical damage, causing you to die quicker. So, it's a good idea to be strategic and use your bullet time in moderation.

       And, like with any kind of shooting video game, ammo conservation comes into play. There is usually plenty of ammo found around the area within chests and sometimes appear through random drops from enemies. You will also find ammo when you revive a downed ally. Ammo capacity (and other weapon specifications like firepower and range) can be increased through upgrades that are also randomly found through enemy drops. However, magazine size may also be upgraded alternatively, through a more complicated, and inconvenient, yet more frequent method. The weapon specific ammo drops and ammo containers allow you to upgrade the weapon in question provided you have not dispensed any ammo from the weapon. This caused me to not want to use my weapons and wait until I upgraded them through the ammo drops. It was a very OCD experience for me. Although, while ammo is much more common than upgrades, it is much less efficient than them.Upgrading through ammo increases specs tick by tick and upgrading through upgrade data increases the weapon efficiency by clusters of these tics. Basically, the former is much slower than the latter.

       The other problem concerning upgrades is the save system. The only kind of saving that exists in this game is autosaving. And there is only one invisible save file.  Why this is a problem is because whenever you fail a mission and restart, you not only lose points, you lose upgrades by a tick if your weapon is at its maximum upgrade. When you restart a mission, the game autosaves and so you're stuck with a downgraded weapon until you find a way to upgrade it again and keep it that way 'til you reach the next checkpoint, where it autosaves. The mission restarts in this game are a lot more merciful than it could have been, however, as you can retry with your current equipment (although downgraded a tad). So, any new weapons you acquired will still be kept. This system can be abused, though. If your weapon is not at its maximum upgrade and you retry a mission, you do not lose your upgrades. That means, you can constantly let yourself die, restart the mission, upgrade your weapon through ammo drops, and repeat until you reach your weapons maximum level. And even that's inconsistent.

       I had the worst experience with the upgrading and the one slot autosaving in this game. Whenever you complete a chapter in the game (consisting of three to eight missions), you are allowed to go back and play that chapter. I thought I could grind by replaying the missions and obtaining upgrades on top of my existing ones, but nope. When you go back and replay a mission, you lose all of your upgrades. And there is no way to reload your previous save because it autosaves when you start a new mission. So, I had two weapons at their fullest potential, but when I went to replay the missions, the upgrades disappeared and I had to replay the whole game from the start to reacquire the upgrades. This, along with being OCD about not using your weapons, can be avoided by not replaying missions until you're done with the entire game and strictly upgrading through actual upgrades and not ammo drops. It's a complicated mess, the upgrade and saving system. It irked me a bit, but once I knew how to work around it, I was fine.

        Halo also doesn't have that great of a save system, either. In fact, it has the same saving system that Vanquish does, so I won't knock off points for it. The upgrading system could have been very addicting if it was done correctly, like creating a currency component to allow you to buy upgrades for your weapons. As I said, however, we're not here to talk about what could have been. It, along with multiplayer, is a missed opportunity.

       Anyway, let's get down to the most criticized aspects of this game.  The length and the story. To be honest, although a short game, I wasn't really bothered by the length.  All eight hours were filled with gun play and action, so it felt pretty substantial to me.  I wouldn't mind going back and having some more fun on a higher difficulty, so that adds some replay value to the game. It would be nice if it was longer, though, since the game was pretty fun.

       The plot is kind of cliche and predictable, but it's no worse than a Halo game, so I don't really see what all the criticism is about. At least it's straight forward and comprehensive. The ulterior motive of the story is actually kind of clever. But, they don't even emphasize on the story in the script most of the time, it's pretty much all about the action. The dialogue  is kind of silly and odd at times. It does have nice voice acting, but some of the voices seem really forced and it definitely shows. In the end, I wanted more Vanquish and the cliff hanger only enhanced that feeling.

       Overall, Vanquish receives an 84 / 100.  Really good, but kind of shallow in extra content and a flawed upgrade system, as well as having missed opportunities.

P.S - Sorry if my review was kind of sloppy, I haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately for some reason. I'll get back to you.

(Adam Michael)