![]() ![]() This design approach also allowed Platinum to lean into their character action roots, creating enemies that encourage constant movement with shmup-esque bullet patterns to dodge. A generous health system allows you to push forward aggressively, strategically picking off enemies out in the open and using cover only to grab a quick breather (Platinum directly encourages this approach, tracking the percentage of time you spend in cover every level). In concert, these mechanics completely invert the standard third-person shooter template established by its contemporary peers like Gears of War. Squeezing the left-bumper sends robotic-suited protagonist Sam Gideon flying across the battlefield, rapidly depleting an energy bar also used to trigger ‘Augmented Reality’ mode, which slows gameplay down to a crawl. The lynchpin of this system is the rocket slide. “It’s very risky, because it breaks all the rules of shooter games: it’s just pure speed.” “There’s been many shooter games around, but they tend to be rather slow in pace, so I wanted to speed it up and make it faster, quicker and more exciting,” Mikami said in a translated GameSpot interview. Mikami also expressed a preference for Western-developed action games at the time, switching from focusing on melee combat to gunplay as a breath of fresh air. Mikami came into Vanquish with the experience of iconic action games like God Hand and Resident Evil 4 under his belt, saying in a 2010 Engadget interview that he specifically aimed to emulate the 70s anime series Casshan, which featured a nimble android protagonist who could defeat huge groups of robots. If character action games like Bayonetta work best as tools to express the player’s creativity, Vanquish remains one of the few truly successful attempts to emulate this ethos in a shooter, alongside the likes of Doom Eternal. And while the fast-paced, aggressively linear campaign feels like a breath of fresh air nowadays, many found the value proposition of a six-hour runtime, alongside optional combat challenges, hard to swallow back in the 360-era.Īnd yet, the strengths of Vanquish’s combat system easily rise above these flaws, shining particularly brightly with the huge performance boost afforded by modern consoles. Swears are thrown around like confetti, lacking weight and instead coming across as a misguided attempt at writing ‘mature’ characters, while a forgettable storyline and generic sci-fi artstyle wastes an imaginative setting, with American marines fighting Russian robots inside a gigantic, cylindrical space station. While Platinum titles aren’t exactly known for their narrative weight, Shinji Mikami’s game is particularly woeful in this regard, with paper-thin characters spouting naff one liners (the highlight arguably being, after a tank has destroyed a pile of debris blocking a tunnel, “This colony won’t be walking straight for a while”). And while Kamiya’s series has gone on to spawn a sequel – with Bayonetta 3 scheduled to come out sometime in the next decade-or-so – Vanquish has been mostly forgotten.Īnd, it must be said, not for entirely unfair reasons. Released a year after Bayonetta, Vanquish has mostly served as an idiosyncratic footnote in the softography of action gaming masters PlatinumGames, albeit briefly sharing the spotlight with Hideki Kamiya’s gun-toting witch as part of a 10th Anniversary Bundle in 2020. ![]() It’s been almost 12 years, and you’d still be hard-pushed to find a third-person shooter that looks as good in motion as Vanquish. All of which takes place in slow-motion, of course. ![]() An answering rocket barrage sends you sliding along the ground as missiles fly overhead, swapping out to a sniper rifle to pull off a trickshot in transit. Then, you toss a grenade at a sniper nest, vaulting over cover to detonate the explosive with a well-timed bullet. After rocket-sliding toward an enemy, you kickflip off them to chain multiple mid-air headshots. ![]()
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