The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

After loving Bayonetta so much, I had to play more of what Platinum had to offer. They made me fall in love with a genre I didn’t give much of a shit about. What could they do with a genre I generally enjoy, that of the third person shooter?

Well, it wasn’t the revelation that Bayonetta was, but Vanquish is a really solid game, and certainly something anyone who enjoys gunshoots should look into.

You are Sam, a dude who works for DARPA. You have a badass robosuit. Russia has space lasered San Francisco, so you and a team of marines are sent in to stop the next Russian attack.
Blah blah, the story doesn’t matter. It’s not making you exclaim “what the fuck?” every two minutes like Bayonetta. It’s a pretty standard shooter plot.

In fact, the whole game looks pretty standard until you start to feel Platinum’s little touches. You don’t pick up guns, but instead have a crazy morphing gun that scans weapons to turn into them and looks obscenely badass doing it. Your melee attacks put full robosuit force to work, and you punch through enemies in a very satisfying way. Some cutscenes feature combat that reminds you that this game came from the same people as Bayonetta, with Sam spinning until he drills through the top of a tank, for instance.

The best part, though, is the rocket legs. By holding down the left bumper, Sam turns on thrusters in his legs, sending him sliding forward on his knees at a rapid pace. This lets you zip between cover points quickly, as well as cover ground to enemies to melee with no problem at all. The best part is that it looks obscenely badass. I would rocket around just to do it, and even at the end of the game, it made me feel extremely cool. This is exactly the sort of thing a mechanic should do.

The game had one interesting weapon, too. The lock-on laser was kind of neat. It was kind of a handheld mortar strike. You would paint enemies and it would fire rockets into the air, home in, and hit them. Most of the rest of the weapons were pretty standard though. I used an assault rifle the whole game, basically. There is a system to level weapons up, too, but since it just kind of happens automatically, it doesn’t feel all that cool, though appreciate it being there.

But all in all Vanquish was a lot of fun. It’s the perfect rental or bargain bin grab, and if you like challenge, it seems to have you covered with higher difficulties I am not into. I had a lot of fun, I’m very glad I played. If this is a “mediocre” Platinum game, well, it still came out better than most shitty third person shooters that hit the Xbox.