Vanquish

Sega

Genre: Action, Third-person shooter

Platform: PS4, Xbox One

When you think of Sega, what video games come to mind? Sonic The Hedgehog would be the main one, right? Other than that maybe Bayonetta, Yakuza or even Virtua Fighter if you’re a little older? Those might be the bigger names but there have been some great cult classics from Sega over the years. One example of this is the third person shooter called Vanquish. This beauty of a game is turning ten years old soon and to celebrate it’s finally seeing a port to the PS4 and Xbox One. Let’s see what this baby has in store for us.

The whole premise of the game is pretty simple. Russians have taken over a giant space colony orbiting the earth and they’re using it to attack America. The laser of this colony destroys San Francisco and now the Russians are demanding that America surrenders. Naturally, this doesn’t happen. The president sends a troop of marines to invade the colony and put the Russians out of commission. You play as former quarterback/scientist/soldier Sam Gideon throughout all of this and spend most of your time bickering with your commanding officer. It’s your standard 80’s action film plot. This might sound a bit cheesy but that’s a big part of the appeal of this game. Vanquish is an extremely fast-paced game so the simplistic story and characters help to keep things from slowing down.

Speaking of the gameplay I should probably go into detail on it. Being a shooter designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 you might think this is a generic cover-based shooter. You’d be partially right. While you can and do use cover the gameplay is built around the Augmented Reaction Suit. The ARS allows you to slide around the field using rockets attached to the suit. The mobility options allowed by this mean you’re going to be playing very aggressively. The other major feature of the ARS is its ability to temporarily boost your characters reflexes. This means that one moment you can be sliding around and the next thing the world is in slow motion as if you’re a character from the Matrix films. They’re extremely fun game mechanics and they give you a lot of room to get creative with combat.

The game itself consists of 29 levels split into 5 acts. The levels all consist of big battles with hordes of robots, boss fights, quick-time events, and set pieces. I’m not a fan of quick-time events in general but they’re fairly minimal and handled well here. Vanquish is a short title. I completed my playthrough on normal difficulty in four and a half hours. That’s not a negative though as it never feels too short. Thanks to the fast-paced, arcade-like gameplay the length of this game just feels right. Vanquish manages to give you enough gameplay to satisfy you while still making you want more. That’s the best praise I can give a game.

Onto the visuals! This is a remaster of the original game and meant to run at 60 FPS and be compatible with 4K. It definitely improves the look of the game but not by as much as you’d expect. Vanquish already looked brilliant when it originally released and the remaster just makes the visuals that little bit clearer. It’s a fresh coat of paint that makes Vanquish look right at home in comparison to other PS4 games. There is one flaw with this from what I played of the game. When Vanquish released on PC there was an issue where enhancing the frame rate to 60 FPS resulted in the player taking more damage. The reason being that the game was originally designed with 30 FPS in mind and the game would calculate things like damage based on that. Enhancing the frame rate meant that these calculations would happen more often every second so you would sometimes receive damage from one hit multiple times. I’d noticed damage seemed inconsistent throughout my playthrough of the PS4 port so I’m concerned it may share the issue. Hopefully, if this is the case we’ll see it fixed through an update shortly after release.

Since I’ve been talking about the games issues another one I came across involved the loading times. You won’t find many in the game. Vanquish seems to load an act at a time so that you’re only faced with a loading screen every 5 or 6 levels. It’s great for maintaining the pace of the game but I found a belter of a loading screen between acts 1 & 2. The game loaded to 50% then slowed to a crawl. Not even a crawl, it was like it was dragging itself along the ground with its chin. I tried restarting this load screen repeatedly and gave the game a few minutes each time to see if it would finally load but it didn’t. After a while, I tried closing the game and restarting multiple times to no success. I even uninstalled and reinstalled the game but still hit this loading screen terror. Eventually, I had to just leave it loading for over an hour while I watched some Doctor who. I checked back regularly until I saw that act 2 had begun and had no issues with loading after that. Apparently, some people had the same issue on the PS3/360 versions so at least I’m not the only one. Still, I’m disappointed this wasn’t addressed during the remaster since it really killed the momentum of the game, temporarily anyway.

Not to sound too negative, I’d like to make a special mention of the influences of this game that I enjoyed. There’s a massive 70’s anime influence here. While the game itself doesn’t use the anime style it draws ideas from the likes of Gundam and Casshern. Between this and the robots Vanquish is bound to appeal to 70’s anime and mecha fans. There’s also a heavy influence from Hideo Kojima games here. The protagonist Sam Gideon looks and talks like Snake, even coming with the cigarettes that can be used during gameplay. Some of the boss designs served as pleasing reminders of the mecha from Zone of the enders. There’s that quirky sense of humour similar to Kojima titles too. You’ll see dancing robots and Starship troopers references throughout this game along with statues similar to the kerotans from MGS3. Vanquish certainly doesn’t feel like a rip-off due to this though. It’s more like a great game paying homage to another great game.

My only major issue with the game, aside from the loading screen was the god hard difficulty level. This is unlocked by completing the game and it’s a massive disappointment. Vanquish stands out from other third-person, cover-based shooters through the ARS so what does god hard do? It reduces your ability to use the ARS and forces you to use cover more. It effectively takes all the uniqueness out of the game. Also, while relatively minor there were times where the dialogue felt too quiet. I occasionally missed chunks of what characters were saying because they were being drowned out by background noise.

Overall though, Vanquish on the PS4 is a great game despite this. It’s brief but it squeezes so much fun out of its runtime that I can’t hold that against it. The characters and gameplay (on most difficulties) are fun while still providing a challenge and the boss fights are amazing. If you’re a fan of shooters, a lover of 70’s anime, a mecha nut or just looking for a fun time then you’ll likely enjoy this game. Vanquish is a cult game that deserves to be mentioned amongst the very best of Sega’s titles.