Reviews from

in the past


Playing Vanquish is like having three seizures at the same time, all while jumping with a parachute from a skyscraper. It's up to you to figure out if it's a bad thing or a good thing.

I'm 100% sure that this is exactly how Shinji Mikami and all of Platinum Games percieve the United States and americans, and I'd say it's about 90% accurate. This game was made by (talented) monkeys, for monkeys, so it's just my thing. The story is stupid, and most of it is told through goddamn loading screens, that last about 2 seconds, so you better read fast. But of course it's not about the story, but the incredibly realistic and absolutely not charicaturised cast of characters; from the top of my head i can't remember a single name, but there was the dude that looked like Raiden who was really cool and smoked like 4 packs of cigaretts in a 7 hour game, the old bionic commando, who's sometimes an asshole and sometimes a little puppy sweetheart, the hot lady, who was there because she's hot, and the russian guy with the same name as the italian volleyball guy (big fan). I'd say that's about it.

The gameplay is fun even though it's pretty unpolished, and it's really easy to see that at higher difficulties (you get one-shotted sooo many times without knowing how you actually died that it's hard to count).The shooting is simple but fun, the cover system surprisingly works pretty well, most weapons are fun to use and there's a good enough enemy variety for a game of this lenght. The bossfights are really cool when they're not completely unfair, with 10000 bullets flying everywhere and 0 covers (but this may be a problem of higher difficulties), and there are a couple that stand out (like when you have to kill dr Manhattan twice). The game works best when you're moving everywhere at the speed of sound, but i'd hoped that there would have been more mechanics related to the dash, other than the slowmo. The highlight of the game though are the cutscens; you can smell Shinji Mikami a mile away.

It's dumb fun, but I think this will appeal only to a certain kind of public. It's roughnessess are forgiven only because this feels like an indie project without an indie budget (and I say this in the most positive way possible). Surely not the game of life, but you'll play this with a big, stupid smile on your face most of the time (when you're not trying destroy your room cause of the oneshot deaths). It also has the greatest end credits of videogame history.

Smoking in cover to distract enemies and blast through them on your knees, in a mech, while shooting missiles in the sky? Hell yeah!

Platinum in their heyday before they sold out and lost all their talented developers in the late 2010s, made absolute gems like this. They did the impossible and took the tired, worn out Gears of War style third person cover based shooter gameplay which was dominating games at the time and actually made it fun.
Rocket sliding into a robot, blackflipping off of its face and sniping his entire platoon all before you hit the ground in bullet time never gets old.

A game designed to make dudes go "hell yeah"

Story 2.8 | Gameplay 4.5 | Audio 3 | Visual 2.3 | Details 3 | Entertainment 4

Total 3.3