Vanquish (Xbox 360, PS3) Review

Five years after more or less inventing the modern third person shooter with Resident Evil 4, Shinji Mikami came back onto the scene with another third person shooter, Vanquish. Although it wasn’t nearly as influential as Resident Evil 4, Vanquish was also a relatively revolutionary game with how it approached the third person shooter. This review will judge Vanquish on its own merits.

 

The main draw of Vanquish is easily the gameplay. Aside from the standard walking, aiming over the shoulder, and hiding behind cover, Vanquish is rather unique for a third person shooter. Players can also dodge, do a rocket boosted slide, or do a powerful melee attack. Whenever the player is doing a movement based ability they can aim and time will move in slow motion, making it easy to aim and shoot at enemies. There are many interesting ways to combine these special moves too, like doing a melee attack during a slide to kick off of a surface or enemy to fly in the air and go into slow motion while in a high viewpoint as well as doing a lot of damage earlier from the kick. These abilities (aside from rolling) are balanced by a meter that slowly empties as you use them. If you empty the meter, the robot suit overheats and it takes longer to begin refilling, which is does automatically and rather quickly otherwise. Vanquish also has some somewhat interesting weapons but compared to other games’ weapon designs its clear that the focus was on the ability of the player rather than the guns they use. Level design and enemy design are only really about average though, unfortunately. The game also isn’t especially difficult even on the base hard mode besides the final boss which is basically a Dark Souls Bell Gargoyle moment out of nowhere. Overall Vanquish is definitely a fun time even if the situations it puts you in aren’t especially clever or varied.

 

Technically Vanquish is only around average. The graphics are pretty good and the effects that are used all over the place are good, but its clear that something else had to suffer for this. The performance in Vanquish is very far from good. The game has severe frame drops all the time even though it only targets 30 FPS. This makes it feel more like a graphically intense SNES game than a modern game, which really doesn’t do the game any favors. The game could have also used some significantly more varied environments, too. Overall this part of the game definitely hurts it a bit.

 

The sound in Vanquish is about average. The voice acting is pretty good but nobody stands out as being especially great. Sound effects are exactly what you would expect. The music is pretty average. Overall the sound in Vanquish doesn’t really help or hurt it.

 

The story in Vanquish is pretty average. Theres one very obvious twist and other than that its a bunch of whatever the whole time that just moves the story along. Overall it doesn’t hurt the game but it definitely doesn’t help it either.

 

In terms of value Vanquish is not very good, as is true of most action games. It isn’t especially long but it has the expected rankings that you can try to do better with in action games. There are also some much more difficult modes than the base difficulties but most people probably won’t be sufficiently interested by them. If you are buying this game definitely look for a sale (not hard at this point).

 

Overall the reviewer would give this game a 8.0 out of 10.

 

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