game Reviews
ULTRAVIOLENT RAYS I received Vanquish on a Friday afternoon at the end of a very long week. I had just returned home from a particularly gruelling job interview, and would have been quite happy to fall into bed and slip quietly into a coma, but instead I booted up the game and said, “Okay Platinum, surprise me.” By the end of the opening cinematic, I had watched the entire population of San Francisco boiled to death by microwave radiation, before being launched into the midst of an insanely frenetic battle aboard an orbital space station. Five hours later, I had played through the entire campaign and violently dismantled about six hundred robots in the process. I was painfully awake.
All your sun are belong to us
Vanquish is the latest title from Platinum Games, the developer responsible for such over-thetop action games as MadWorld and Bayonetta. It takes place in the near future, at a time when gross overpopulation has placed tremendous pressure on the world’s dwindling energy sources. America’s solution to this is Providence, an immense self-sustaining space colony that harnesses solar energy to generate unlimited power. Unfortunately, Providence attracts the attention of a Russian nationalist group that would prefer to use it as a handy weapon of mass destruction; they seize the station and channel its collected energy on to San Francisco, whose citizens sizzle and burst in a most unpleasant fashion. War is declared, and US forces are dispatched to the station. Among them is Sam Gideon, a DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) researcher who is field testing the latest in battlefield apparel, the Augmented Reaction Suit. This lengthy introduction launches you quite seamlessly into combat, and from there you’re quickly forced to master the various capabilities
r e vi e wed
Vanquish (Xbox 360/PS3) r e vi e wed by
Hugh Milligan r ated
9/10 of the ARS. The suit is equipped with rockets on both its arms and legs, allowing it to boost and evade fire at blinding speeds, and can also activate brief periods of slow-motion by quickening your reflexes. Speed is your best friend in combat — you’re actually surprisingly fragile, and can be knocked down by a few good bursts of gunfire, so it’s best to burst quickly from cover to cover and use your incredible mobility to keep enemies off-target. The ARS can quite easily overheat if its abilities are overused, and you’re punished severely if you don’t use them intelligently. The result is a high-risk, high-reward gameplay style that moves at a frenzied pace and keeps you constantly on your toes.
“Who invited the chandelier?”
Beyond its initial concept, the narrative isn’t actually developed all that much, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Bayonetta suffered from an unreasonable excess of plot twists, flashbacks and contradictions that interrupted the flow of each level, but here the story remains quite linear and unobtrusive. Most of the action and dialogue takes place during combat or through cutscenes, but the game will actually switch to first-person perspective on occasion, allowing you to see the HUD inside Sam’s visor as maps and camera footage are displayed in a sort of real-time briefing screen. It all flows together seamlessly — there’s no downtime between levels and you’re never really removed from the action.
The dialogue itself is terrible of course, sometimes to the point of hilarity. My favourite quotes include “I’m not your turret bitch!”, “Thank God I’m an atheist!” and “This is starting to sound like a bad video game!” Sam is also, oddly enough, a heavy smoker. It seems he can’t have a single conversation without lighting up, and can even do so in combat — you can actually take a smoke break while behind cover and distract the enemy with your lit butt as you toss it. During the final mission, he stops for a cigarette while hanging onehanded above an abyss, saying, “Nothing better than a smoke to remind you you’re alive.” I can’t decide whether Platinum is satirising Hollywood clichés of male bravado, or whether it actually thinks guys like that are really cool.
Bright ideas
The Russians are avid machinists, it seems, and your adversaries in Providence are all robots and unmanned mechanical vehicles. I was actually surprised at how quickly these are introduced to you; barely ten minutes into the first Act, my progress was blocked by a hulking sixty-foot Argus robot that was able to swat down most of my squad. After doing enough damage to its legs (which, like in all video games, had glowing lights conveniently installed on their weak points), a quick time event was triggered whereby I leapt up its body, grabbed a missile that it had fired into the air and dunked it back down into its artillery port. It worked responsively, looked incredible and made the battle all the more climactic (and the Argus robot all the more lopsided). It’s small touches like these that give the whole game a cinematic flair. While the first portion of the game features the same clean, sanitised industrial setting (a little reminiscent of Appleseed), further environments are eventually explored. Sam’s
route through the station is also punctuated with freight trains, monorails and flying transports that shake up the gameplay, and there are a number of moments that pay tribute to other games — one mission in particular, which required me to protect an APC from scampering bomb bots as it cast its headlights down a pitch dark tunnel, felt suspiciously familiar. Regardless of the environment, the game’s visuals are stunning. As the entire station is cylindrical, looking into the ‘sky’ allows you to see massive substructures looming all around you, and it creates a vast sense of scale.
Over in a flash
If there’s any real problem with Vanquish, it lies in the game’s limited depth. I burned through the campaign on Normal Mode in four to five hours, and while this unlocks God Hard Mode and a set of challenges to complete, there’s not a whole lot else to keep you coming back. While Bayonetta included a host of unlockable weapons, characters and costumes, some of them fiendishly difficult to obtain, Vanquish relies on little more than an online leaderboard to draw out any sense of replay value. It would have been nice to see Platinum include some extra suits to earn at the very least. As it is, you can try to beat your score for bragging rights, but other than that you’ll probably just dip into your favourite missions when the mood takes you. Vanquish is like a syringe of adrenaline straight to the heart. It flows like quicksilver from one encounter to the next, and it definitely won’t mollycoddle you along the way. Most enemies have abilities that can destroy you in one or two hits, and if you make a mistake, you’ll know it. It has an ultra-slick presentation from start to finish — beyond the finish, I just wish there was a little more.
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reverb magazine issue #052 — november 2010 39