perfectly imperfect. it's not my intention to unleash Gamer Mode but this game's profile, for me, was really heightened due to three separate yet interrelated factors: the addition of a crisp 60FPS included in the ported edition, opting for the mostly well-tuned hard difficulty, and playing on a controller that isn't the dualshock 3. these components were tangible right from the start and coalesced to create the kind of flow state vanquish so often strives for very early-on in the experience.
it's kind of a misunderstood game sometimes, even by its supporters. rabble rousers who didn't engage with the mechanics will tell you it's a generic third person shooter, but they wouldn't exactly be wrong; what makes the cogs in vanquish roar to life has far more to do with the speed of the title as you boost slide from cover to cover and intelligently utilize your suit's reactive time-slowdown to dispatch droves of robots. getting to that level of play can be difficult for first-timers who either approach it as they would any other unseasoned third-person shooter or attempt to play it with the community-ascribed mechanical gravitas burdening their playstyle, when in reality, the optimal way to play is a mix of both approaches. and when these efforts work, they really do shine brilliantly. there's a certain level of madness here not seen in other third person shooters that i'm sure i'd somehow enjoy even more if i had the chance to play on pc and could use the suits timing to kill more than 3 or 4 bots at a time, something closely resembling a high-octane max payne. fluency promotes fluidity which leads to battleground dominance, and there's enough light weapons experimentation and tactical play stringing the replayable experience along to make the game worth the first run and then some. it's at its best in these sterile futuristic halls as you vault over cover, wipe the floor with three enemies, then in one gambit slide around a romanov to fire a shotgun shell into his achilles heel before delivering a coup de grace with your melee. sam gideon's the most unassuming middle-aged looking guy but you trap him in that gear and he'll have the combat expertise and battle readiness of any other platinum protagonist. you ever seen those first videos of tom brady at the NFL scouting combine where he just looks utterly pathetic running drills? same deal. that's football quarterbacks for ya
it's the melee system here that is one of the most questionable mechanics on offer, so i want to pivot a bit more here to where vanquish fails to deliver, because in so many ways this titles in dire need of a sequel it will never receive. many have pointed out that the melees in this title detract from experimentation because completely depleting your resources seems too harsh a penalty, and i would agree despite what i think the intention might be (i.e. your melee as a desperation move - completely rote). what's more interesting to me is that this highlights a meaningful failure to synergize melee and gunplay together into a cohesive whole from the person who directed resident evil 4. there are shades of what this game could and should have been when you come to learn that sliding melees, when utilized on terrain like cover or walls, will give you enough airtime to fire a few slugs into mechanical skulls at no cost, but these are negligible in the grand scheme of things. considering how many CQC techniques sam uses in the cutscenes this is a bit of a missed opportunity to create some really fun opportunities for combat experimentation. it didn't need to be about space control ala RE4, but it should have been incorporated into the movement as well and i think melee techniques designed to keep momentum going operating in tandem with melee techniques that are about halting momentum to safely deal massive damage could have been a step in the preferable direction
instead we have a repertoire of weapons meant to facilitate said experimentation, which is fine save for two things: the situational tendencies of your armory and the abysmal weapon ranking system. i see no reason to delve too deeply into the first other than to say the assault rifle and the shotgun are consistently two of your best weapons and that you'll probably want the rocket launcher for a bit whenever it comes up. the real problem here is the knowledge that in order to upgrade a weapon, you'll need to either hope an enemy drops an upgrade chip or you'll need to conserve that weapon's ammo entirely and hope you can find an equivalent pickup. for instance, to upgrade an assault rifle, i'd want to not use the assault rifle so i can hopefully, by the grace of god, find three more ammo pickups to slot in an upgrade necessary to make the weapon perform. just utterly baffling, made slightly worse by a strange checkpoint system which punishes these rankings upon death, which conceptually makes sense but given that these aren't meaningfully tied to the (also not good) scoring system they're hardly a galvanizing incentive for players to achieve mastery, either. ironically this whole bit is made worse in the remaster where i quickly learned that, thanks to better load times, instead of using a checkpoint that would reset my ranking, i could simply go to the title screen on a game over and reload my save for a few extra seconds without suffering any debilitations, which further hampers an already dull and arbitrary scoring system
the last point to be made here is just that this game's full of conceptual detritus. i've warmed up a bit more to the premise and tone of the title but it occupies a strange nexus between platinums over the top sensibility and sledgehammer satire (ala madworld) and a westernized gears of war-esque romp. you could liken this narrative approach to something not too dissimilar from metal gear but given the high concept behind the playable supersoldier in question it would have been nice to have something that made a bit more of an aesthetic splash. it's a surprisingly drab game without a lot of memorable hooks beyond the mechanics. making something that was a bit more like neo-human casshern in its flavoring would probably have made this game stood out a bit more, for me, but i think the direction the game went for makes sense considering the context of its development. this game's already as westernized as it can be and you had braingeniuses like arthur gies say, and i quote, "it's repetitive, clunky, and irritatingly punitive. very japanese." how do you get past consumers like that
anyways yet another feather in the hat for the general rule of thumb: the best third-person shooters have 'shinji mikami' somewhere in the credits. sasuga platinum
(edit for posteritys sake: im gonna be chipping away at learning god hard difficulty on my lonesome and i expect some of this review may be untrue by the end, at least with regards to ranking and armory)
it's kind of a misunderstood game sometimes, even by its supporters. rabble rousers who didn't engage with the mechanics will tell you it's a generic third person shooter, but they wouldn't exactly be wrong; what makes the cogs in vanquish roar to life has far more to do with the speed of the title as you boost slide from cover to cover and intelligently utilize your suit's reactive time-slowdown to dispatch droves of robots. getting to that level of play can be difficult for first-timers who either approach it as they would any other unseasoned third-person shooter or attempt to play it with the community-ascribed mechanical gravitas burdening their playstyle, when in reality, the optimal way to play is a mix of both approaches. and when these efforts work, they really do shine brilliantly. there's a certain level of madness here not seen in other third person shooters that i'm sure i'd somehow enjoy even more if i had the chance to play on pc and could use the suits timing to kill more than 3 or 4 bots at a time, something closely resembling a high-octane max payne. fluency promotes fluidity which leads to battleground dominance, and there's enough light weapons experimentation and tactical play stringing the replayable experience along to make the game worth the first run and then some. it's at its best in these sterile futuristic halls as you vault over cover, wipe the floor with three enemies, then in one gambit slide around a romanov to fire a shotgun shell into his achilles heel before delivering a coup de grace with your melee. sam gideon's the most unassuming middle-aged looking guy but you trap him in that gear and he'll have the combat expertise and battle readiness of any other platinum protagonist. you ever seen those first videos of tom brady at the NFL scouting combine where he just looks utterly pathetic running drills? same deal. that's football quarterbacks for ya
it's the melee system here that is one of the most questionable mechanics on offer, so i want to pivot a bit more here to where vanquish fails to deliver, because in so many ways this titles in dire need of a sequel it will never receive. many have pointed out that the melees in this title detract from experimentation because completely depleting your resources seems too harsh a penalty, and i would agree despite what i think the intention might be (i.e. your melee as a desperation move - completely rote). what's more interesting to me is that this highlights a meaningful failure to synergize melee and gunplay together into a cohesive whole from the person who directed resident evil 4. there are shades of what this game could and should have been when you come to learn that sliding melees, when utilized on terrain like cover or walls, will give you enough airtime to fire a few slugs into mechanical skulls at no cost, but these are negligible in the grand scheme of things. considering how many CQC techniques sam uses in the cutscenes this is a bit of a missed opportunity to create some really fun opportunities for combat experimentation. it didn't need to be about space control ala RE4, but it should have been incorporated into the movement as well and i think melee techniques designed to keep momentum going operating in tandem with melee techniques that are about halting momentum to safely deal massive damage could have been a step in the preferable direction
instead we have a repertoire of weapons meant to facilitate said experimentation, which is fine save for two things: the situational tendencies of your armory and the abysmal weapon ranking system. i see no reason to delve too deeply into the first other than to say the assault rifle and the shotgun are consistently two of your best weapons and that you'll probably want the rocket launcher for a bit whenever it comes up. the real problem here is the knowledge that in order to upgrade a weapon, you'll need to either hope an enemy drops an upgrade chip or you'll need to conserve that weapon's ammo entirely and hope you can find an equivalent pickup. for instance, to upgrade an assault rifle, i'd want to not use the assault rifle so i can hopefully, by the grace of god, find three more ammo pickups to slot in an upgrade necessary to make the weapon perform. just utterly baffling, made slightly worse by a strange checkpoint system which punishes these rankings upon death, which conceptually makes sense but given that these aren't meaningfully tied to the (also not good) scoring system they're hardly a galvanizing incentive for players to achieve mastery, either. ironically this whole bit is made worse in the remaster where i quickly learned that, thanks to better load times, instead of using a checkpoint that would reset my ranking, i could simply go to the title screen on a game over and reload my save for a few extra seconds without suffering any debilitations, which further hampers an already dull and arbitrary scoring system
the last point to be made here is just that this game's full of conceptual detritus. i've warmed up a bit more to the premise and tone of the title but it occupies a strange nexus between platinums over the top sensibility and sledgehammer satire (ala madworld) and a westernized gears of war-esque romp. you could liken this narrative approach to something not too dissimilar from metal gear but given the high concept behind the playable supersoldier in question it would have been nice to have something that made a bit more of an aesthetic splash. it's a surprisingly drab game without a lot of memorable hooks beyond the mechanics. making something that was a bit more like neo-human casshern in its flavoring would probably have made this game stood out a bit more, for me, but i think the direction the game went for makes sense considering the context of its development. this game's already as westernized as it can be and you had braingeniuses like arthur gies say, and i quote, "it's repetitive, clunky, and irritatingly punitive. very japanese." how do you get past consumers like that
anyways yet another feather in the hat for the general rule of thumb: the best third-person shooters have 'shinji mikami' somewhere in the credits. sasuga platinum
(edit for posteritys sake: im gonna be chipping away at learning god hard difficulty on my lonesome and i expect some of this review may be untrue by the end, at least with regards to ranking and armory)
Ardwyw_mp3
2 years ago
chef's kiss