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| Finished this last night. It was pretty good! by Jerry Whorebach 10/26/2011, 2:52pm PDT | ||||
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| Playing Vanquish made me think Shinji Mikami heard all those ridiculous complaints about the lack of sidestepping in Resident Evil 4, and actually took them to heart. Your character in this game has more mobility options than any third-person shooter protagonist in history, including an omni-directional dodge roll and a rocket-assisted dash (the latter of which has you sliding along the floor on your knees like some kind of futuristic outer-space rock-and-roller). You never lack for tactical choice in Vanquish, and there's rarely (if ever) only one way to go about solving a particular encounter. I imagine you could get through the entire campaign playing it like Gears of War - you might not have as much fun as if you were playing it like Virtual-On, but you'd almost certainly finish.
If Vanquish has one weakness, it's probably the robot enemies; they do their job, they're just nothing you haven't seen before ("shoot the joints to expose the core!" "this one's made of liquid metal!"). And, let's face it, it's hard to get too excited about killing something that wasn't technically alive to begin with. Also, I never did come to grips with the weapon upgrade system, only learned to live with it. I presume they were going for some kind of compromise between a traditional STG power-up mechanic and Ratchet & Clank's progressive grindathon, but I can't imagine fans of either approach being particularly satisfied with the result. (In fairness, this was probably only an issue for me because I died so fucking much.) Everything else was great, though, including the story (which takes an unexpected turn for the political in the last act - well, unexpected if you never played a Japanese game about war before) and especially the dialogue (I would be very happy if someone were to make a conversation-driven RPG that lives up to this standard). As far as I'm concerned, Vanquish represents the state of the art in corridor shooters, and is easily worth the $19 you'll pay for it. [SPOILERS]Beating it on HARD unlocks GOD HARD, after which the playable closing credits take the form of the Asteroids minigame from Dead Space - with photos of the designers stamped on the asteroids! This game never stops entertaining.[/SPOILERS] |
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