Review: Vanquish
Available on XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. Developed by Platinum Games. Published by Sega.
The Japanese video game industry is in a weird place. Big western studios backed by big western publishers are directing the gaming climate these days, and aside from Nintendo, who stubbornly blaze their own trail, Japanese developers are making weak and flailing attempts to fit in. Vanquish, a fast-paced, third-person shooter, tries to pin the slick, melodramatic style of anime onto the desperate, cigar-chomping badassery of Gears of War, and ends up with something occasionally hot, but far too short and silly to be more than a forgettable distraction.
You control Sam the DARPA scientist, who smokes, speaks, and spits jargon just like Solid Snake, and who wears an experimental suit that provides him with some nifty abilities (also like Solid Snake, now that I think about it). Like most anime mechanical designs, the suit is powerful to use, but silly to look at. Seriously: the helmet features guards over the eyes and a visor over the mouth. The wearer will be blind, but his squad will be able to tell if he’s smiling.
Anyway, San Francisco gets cooked by some microwave ray fired from some space station hijacked by some Russian guy. The President of the United States, played by Joan Allen, sends a Team of Grizzled Marines (and for some reason, Sam) up to the station to rescue some scientist and take back the place. The details aren’t really that important. The important parts are the firefights, which are usually set in large open areas with lots of opportunities for Sam to take cover, gather weapons, toss grenades, yell at his squadmates to get out of the way, and blast a lot of red robots. I don’t call them that because they’re Russian; most of the enemies in this game really are colored bright red.
The graphics are quite good. Everything is sharp and sterile-looking, with lots of chunky white surfaces to make them look techy and futuristic. Since there’s only one setting in the game, though, you won’t see much variety in the environments. It’s just a lot of windows and catwalks. The cylindrical shape of the space station means you’ll see structures curling up from one end of the horizon to the other, like Halo’s ringworlds. A lot of stuff is burnt up and smashed, of course, and the particle effects on display here look great. The explosions are fantastic, and it’s a joy to watch the bad guys crackle and burst after you’ve pumped them up with lead. Bullets, blood, smoke, sparks, and bits of busted robot rain over every battle, creating a terrific sensation of chaos.
You might be tempted at first to play Vanquish in the same careful manner as you would other cover-based shooters like Uncharted or Gears, but the powers of Sam’s silly suit mean you don’t have to. The suit comes with built-in boosters that allow Sam to slide about like a baseball runner on a luge, only faster. This incredible mobility means you can play the game on your own terms, and flanking bad guys, dodging incoming fire, and sweeping up collectibles is a snap.
The other big feature of the suit is its “synaptic-reflexive augmentation,” better known as Tequila Time. By executing a rolling dodge and then holding the aim button, you can snap Sam into Max Payne mode at will. Some of the more agile robots, as well as the weak spots on the bosses, are nigh impossible to shoot while moving at normal speed, so the bullet time is a necessity.
These two suit powers are neat additions to the third-person shooter kit, but even though they can only be used for brief periods, the advantages they offer you are so great that the game becomes extremely easy. You’ll never feel pinned in place when you can literally run circles around your enemies. When your health is critically low, your suit’s bullet time kicks in automatically, giving you ample time to retreat and recover. What’s more, if you pick up a weapon that you already have, and its ammunition is at full capacity, the weapon will upgrade, Ratchet & Clank style. It will increase in ammo capacity, damage, or firing rate, tilting the scales of power even further in your direction.
There really isn’t much more to tell here. The battle for the space station lasts for a measly five hours, so there isn’t much room for variety. The designers took a few chances: there’s a gunfight on a fast-moving monorail that requires you to blast all the bad guys within a time limit (which, of course, isn’t a great challenge when YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN), and a small scene that requires you to shoot out some spotlights. Everything else is one big, open gunfight after another, with melodramatic voice acting filling in the gaps. You get a lot of what the Japanese think is just so damn cool, like super slow-motion, goofily gruff man-banter, inappropriate smoke breaks, and a hot blonde standing in a ring of minority report screens over at control, telling you what’s going to happen next. The girl is usually shown from a creepy, upskirt angle.
Probably the weirdest, and most irritating thing about this game, next to the awful acting, is that between fights, the camera will sometimes zoom into Sam’s helmet, revealing a first-person view. This usually means that you’re about to briefed on something, so you’ll have to endure what amounts to a mildly controllable Codec conversation. You can move Sam around as normal, but his speed is reduced, and you can’t use the boosters or pick up items or fire your guns. You can’t advance or accomplish anything until the talking is done and the camera zooms back out to the standard third-person view, so I have to ask: WHY AREN’T THESE JUST REGULAR, SKIPPABLE CUTSCENES?!
What the hell is going on? Gears of War, Uncharted 1 and 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption: they all have these endless scenes where you drag the characters around for minutes on end, while they all just jaw at each other. No action, just yakking! What happened here? Aren’t these shooting games supposed to be the pinnacle of thrilling, overstimulating entertainment? When was the walk-and-talk deemed hot video game action?
I complained about this in a comment to a Kotaku article a few months ago, and some jackass replied by saying, “It’s called a story, which most games tend to have. :/” I say, hey junior, maybe you’re too young or too busy watching Naruto to remember, but there was a time when video game stories were nothing but blurbs in manuals, and though they may have been paper-thin and dumber than a dimestore novel, they never immovably forced themselves into the game experience to pad it out. I say this shit has gone on for too long, and it’s time to go back to the tried and true rule of years past: if you can’t die in a scene, make it skippable.
Maybe that jackass is the kind of person Vanquish was made for. The game is loaded with laughable, over-the-top action and testosterone so the kids playing it can feel cool and powerful, but it also has a lot of unnecessary story and jargon so they can feel like they’re playing something smart and meaningful. Being a grown-up, I’d rather have a game that goes one way or the other.
Vanquish is neither smart nor meaningful, and it’s too easy to be considered worthwhile. It’s like a sweet but unsatisfying soda: briefly stimulating, but not made to fill you up. The characters and story are the definition of “disposable,” and the game ends without challenging or exploiting your suit’s unique capabilities. I can appreciate that you have to create most of the golden moments yourself by way of quick thinking, like when you boost past a phalanx of robots that’s holding your squad back so you can blow them all up with a single grenade, but your character is so powerful, and the levels so simple and straightforward, that you rarely need to use this sort of strategic maneuvering. The game is shockingly short, and doesn’t even offer a multiplayer option to extend its lifespan – not that multiplayer would have worked well with the bullet time mechanic.
With Vanquish, Sega has only succeeded at imitating its betters, and it doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson: next year, it’s gracing us with Binary Domain, ANOTHER game with meatheaded marines yelling at each other and gunning down gaily colored robots. Let me know when the storm is over; I’ll be in my den playing Just Cause 2.
Controller1.com rating: 1/3
