Tweet
"To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory." Had 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille not suffered the misfortune of being born 400 or so years before Vanquish was released, I'm fairly sure he would have admired Shinji Mikami's excellent third-person shooter. Indeed, there's an echo of Corneille's words in the Mikami-directed remake of Resident Evil on GameCube: the more challenging difficulty setting, Mountain Climbing, points out that "beyond the hardships lies accomplishment". It's a maxim that has served one of the medium's best game designers well over his storied career, and particularly so here.There's plenty of glory in your triumphs in Vanquish, because it consistently ensures you're in peril. Enemies are powerful, aggressive and often much larger than you. You're rarely more than a few seconds away from a hail of bullets, or worse, a hail of missiles arcing through the sky towards you. When you crouch behind scenery in other third-person shooters, it's often to reload, or to briefly recover your health. Here you're hunkering down to get the hell out of the way, and often that's still not enough. Hiding behind waist-high walls is not the way to play Vanquish.
But then the encouragement to move into the open and face the onslaught head-on is there from the start. The Augmented Reaction Suit isn't just an incredibly cool piece of Japanese design; it's also responsible for one of the best risk-reward mechanics I've ever seen. It runs off an energy supply that begins depleting immediately upon squeezing L2 (there's something about the DualShock's squishy triggers that makes Vanquish feel gloriously right on PS3) and allows you to pull off a rocket-powered slide that feels amazing. It's a cross between a Ridge Racer car mid-drift and a five-year-old at a wedding reception skidding across the dancefloor on their knees.
Read more…
More...