Vanquish PS4 Review
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Vanquish
- Developer: Platinum
- Publisher: SEGA
- PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Releasing at the peak of the considered, slow paced cover shooter, Vanquish felt like a game from the future. Despite a short run time that repeated several tricks, Vanquish’s attempt to subvert genre conventions with high speed moves gave in an edge people still praise today. But what felt futuristic now feels out of time. Ten years is a long time to reappraise a work and its flaws have only become more apparent with time. Vanquish remains enjoyable, but almost in spite of the game presented to you.
I played Vanquish when it released, and enjoyed it enough, despite the egregious, inconsistent balance and skeletal campaign. It’s core mechanics had promise, but there were so many small issues I felt I’d played a different game than the one people still sing the praise of today. This time I around I made a commitment to diving deeper, learning the advanced techniques the community had discovered within the game.
Boost dodging, diagonal boosts, melee and reload cancels all offered new ways to keep up momentum and minimize downtime. Each involved canceling animations to get a move’s benefits without completing their long animations.
The best examples are reload cancels and boost dodging. By switching back and forth between weapons while the reload animation plays, you can instantly reload any weapon, allowing you to continuously fire, and greatly increasing the utility if weapons like the sniper, rocket launcher or LFE gun that normally have long cool downs. Likewise, by dodging out of the opening frames of a boost slide, you can maintain momentum and get long invulnerability frames without using any of your boost meter. This gives you a safer way to move around quickly, and allows more frequent use of bullet time.
Those two techniques along completely changed the way I approached the game, and suddenly I felt as if I was closer to that high speed, non-stop action game that people talked about. I could play faster, riskier and retaliate often. Weapons like the LFE gun, which fires a huge, slow moving ball of energy, suddenly became viable as I could fire them off at close range and retreat without fear of overheating and dooming myself.
But I can’t help but feel these techniques are at odds with the game’s core mechanics. None of these would even be necessary had the game been balanced differently. Would I use boost dodging if boost sliding, the game’s signature mechanic, allowed me to escape without being put in a vulnerable spot? Is having the ability to cancel reloads better than if they had straight up removed them and allowed me to fire continuously?
None of the techniques that make Vanquish fun solve the game’s core problems, they simply sidestep them. It ends up with a game whose lasting power comes from using seemingly arbitrary tech and increasing your actions per minute to work around the game’s balance.
The Vanquish experience most people will have is one closer to my original one–a game that constantly asks you to push further, move fast and take risks but doesn’t give you the tools to do so. A game full of interesting moves that punishes you for using them too often. The experience of Vanquish is an experience of constant tensions. Between what you’re asked to do, what you’re allowed to do and what you can wring out of it on the margins.
Vanquish only succeeds when you’re willing to subvert its mechanics and break the limits imposed on you. In every other context, it’s a half-baked cover shooter with a gimmick it can’t support.