Vanquish

I've been going through some backlog games. This is an older one, and certainly an artifact of the era in which it was originally released. I like to call it the "who is this even for?" era of Japanese games. You see, back in the nineties, Sega and Nintendo ran the scene. They needed novel software to push their various console hardware. Games came out at a frightening pace back then. A lot of game enthusiasts forget that then, just as now, the majority of those games were trash. For every Link to the Past you got at least ten games like Krusty's Super Fun House. The same analogy could apply to, say, Shining Force and Wayne's World. Or maybe, if you're a PlayStation kind of person, Resident Evil 2 and Bubsy 3D. By the late 2000s, the curve got flatter and more boring. Games became more cumbersome and expensive to make. Publishers started to tighten their coffers. As more people picked up the hobby games were developed to appeal to the broadest common denominator. That's why Platinum was so special in those days. Bayonetta is still one of my favorite games of all time. I waited to finally get around to Vanquish for forever. It's just kind of okay, though. Who is the intended audience of Vanquish? Lovers of cool, weird action games with novel mechanics? I guess. It could happen. The gray mud motif of so many Xbox 360 and PS3 games might put them off a little. Vanquish has a plot about a nightmare World War 3 scenario that you might see in one of those weird futuristic Call of Duty games. It seems like a vain attempt to capture the Gears of War crowd with its stop and pop cover shooting and levels rotten with chest high walls. Vanquish kind of makes up for these shortcomings with novel moving and aiming mechanics. For a thing so fundamental to shooters of the era, very few games ever bothered to do anything interesting with those mechanics. You can jet boost from cover to cover, stopping to bust off a few slow motion rounds in the middle of that trajectory. It feels like playing Max Payne with rocket skates and Marcus Fenix's regenerating health. With the addition of oddball weapons and bossfights, maybe there's a little Panzer Dragoon and Omega Boost in there. You also get annoying elements of the era. Quick time events are scattered throughout high tension moments in the campaign. Damage feedback against the robot enemies doesn't always feel the best. Some of the enemies in the game are annoying to fight to the point where I dreaded them showing up. The uncanny melodrama of the voice performances lend the game a bizarre atmosphere. Overall, though, I would recommend Vanquish. It has more fun moments than frustrating ones. It's not the best game ever made, but I don't feel like I wasted my time playing it. If you haven't tried Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, and maybe even Gears of War, try some of those first. If you're hungry for more, maybe pick up Vanquish on sale.