Vanquish Review

The Gears of War games are good but nothing special. GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption are beautifully-written but boring. No Halo-style-healing & shoot-from-behind-cover, 3rd person shooter has made it onto Paul's great list. Until now?

No.

Let's do something different this time. Let's call this "The Halo Healing System/Shoot-From-Behind-Cover, 3rd-Person Shooter Review (Part 1)." And let's picture the Gears of War designers talking about how to make their game not boring.

Gears Dev 1 says to Gears Dev 2: "Gears Dev 2, I've noticed that the hide behind cover and wait for your health to regenerate system makes the tension the health-pack system had not exist! Our game currently comes down to shooting the enemies and ducking whenever they shoot at you. It's stuck in Obvious Dominant Strategy land. What should we do?"

Gears Dev 2: "Let's throw in some big bullet sponge monsters that'll force the player to expose themself to fire as they try to take it down. That'll throw in moments of risk.  ALSO! LET'S THROW IN FAST MOVING, SMALL ALIENS THAT DO LOTS OF DAMAGE!" (glee)

Gears Dev 1: "Sure, okay, and let's make sure we don't do that too much, 'cause then the game will lack variety."

Gears Dev 2: "Ah! I see what you mean. Well, let's also add some turret and driving sections. Plus boss battles. And give the player lots of weapons. Make sure there are some quiet sections, too. And also, make almost every 'character' a steroid-using, racial or alien stereotype, who speaks with the accent of a large truck."

Gears Dev 2: "That...is genius! We're going to make so much money!"

And eventually it came out and made so much money. But it was nothing really special. And no, I didn't care that it was "the goriest, bloodiest thing ever and had the best graphics at the time" because it wasn't and it didn't.

NOT that I'm saying the Gears of Wars were bad games. They were good. But this was in spite of what Gears Dev 1 was worried about.

And now we have the Japanese take on the genre, Vanquish.

In Vanquish you play as "Sam Gideon," and your mission is to vanquish a Russian, terrorist, robot army on a super weapon city in space that had just vanquished most of San Francisco. Your main personality trait is smoking, wearing a prototype mecha-suit, vanquishing enemies via your guns, and caring (yes, he's a little complex). Just like Gears of War you'll often be fighting alongside other soldiers, or United States Marines as United States Marines like to be called, and these men are led by the angry LTC Robert Burns, who is a half-man, half-minigun character. Your contemporary president is an incredibly dumb blonde. And your aid, "Elena Ivanovna," who is said to have an I.Q. of 180, is a hot, blonde, stupid head. Etc. It all could have been one of the best comedy video games ever, but thanks to terrible writing, isn't. Oh well.

The game has two mechanics which distinguish it from Gears of War. One is your mecha-suit's ability to make Bullet Time. If your suit isn't currently over-heated (or currently hurting and making the screen turn red, like in too many other games), you'll have the ability to slow down time. Sometimes you'll automatically slow down time when your health goes too low. It looks cool in the same way Max Payne's bullet time does; or for you movies people, like The Matrix.

The other mechanic is the jetting across the ground one. When Sam gets down on his knees, he can jet across the ground at 100 mph. And it's kind of cool. Who wouldn't want to jet across the ground at 100mph on their shins and knees?

These powers can be used simultaneously but not wantonly. They draw on the same energy source of not-being-over-heated and not-being-over-pained. And unlike Gears of War's visual gimmicks, it actually affects gameplay.

[Not to say Vanquish is better than Gears of War, because it isn't.]

For some reason Platinum Games (the developers of Vanquish) decided to apply the most boring color scheme to their game. Grey. The environment varies from light to dark grey. Your allies are grey. The enemies are red, blue, and grey. And there's a fifteen minute-bit with grass and trees (they're green).

Also their game doesn't have any sort of co-op. I don't see that as a bad thing in itself, but at the same time, the Gears of Wars have co-op, which gives their about-as-good-as-Vanquish campaigns something extra.

But really, what keeps all these games from greatness is the Halo-healing, chest-high-walls system, founder of that easy-to-pull-off-dominant-strategy, even on hard difficulty. It's a hopelessly unexciting thing, often made annoying by little things, like the western Gears of War-style games' tendency to have you hide behind the wrong cover, despite you thinking you pressed the buttons in the right ways and at the right times next to the right cover; or Vanquish's left stick, which tends to make you accidentally leave your cover -- instead of just crawling along it -- which is particularly dangerous when many of the enemies' shots cause sudden death in Hard difficulty (which, by the way, is the difficulty you'll need to play it on, because "Normal" is "Too Easy," as usual).

There was one moment in Vanquish when I thought there was hope for the genre, though; the final boss battle, which involves two man-sized, fast-moving, flying, super robots, armed with swords and insta-kill lasers. Their level features cover that not only moves up, but sometimes moves down. It all forces you to play at your 110% (on Hard difficulty), and I was, finally, after more than a hundred hours of these games, put into that psychological state of Flow.

But after a while I couldn't stand not being able to move the camera at the speeds a computer mouse would allow. I would be moving fast around the map, dodging lasers and sword slashes, and wham! I'd bump into a wall that wasn't there before; I was moving towards it, not seeing it in its popped up state, because the camera couldn't turn as fast as my shin-skiing would move me. And after crashing into it I would be killed by a laser.

Now, I know that the Vanquish pros (of which there are three) would comment something like, "Well you're just not very good at the level. Play it a couple more hours and you'll know where you should be looking always and when what walls will go up and down."

7/10

Vanquish is available for XBOX 360. You hadn't heard of it before because it's called Vanquish.