4cr Preview – Vanquish

Platinum Games has a rare gift. Their games are undeniably stylish and fast-paced. In a word, they are – well – cinematic. Yet, at the same time, they are very much gameplay focused. They don’t rely on a series of half-hour cutscenes to make you feel like you’re in an action movie. Instead, they take some fundamental genre – the brawler for Mad World or the 3rd person action game for Bayonetta – and crank up the insanity to 11.

It works. Bayonetta was spectacularly crazy, and completely cinematic. You felt like you were in some overblown anime, and I loved it. Their fourth game, Vanquish, takes your standard cover-based shooter and kicks the cinematic nature up an extra notch.

Vanquish takes place in humanity’s distant future. The United States has built a space station to harvest energy from the sun. Russia, wanting to get in on the action, invades and captures the station. After using the station’s weaponry to destroy San Francisco, the US sends their armed forces on a suicide mission to recapture the station before the Russians can bomb New York. You play as everyman researcher Sam.

As a scientist, you have some pretty cool tools at your disposal. Your gun, for instance, can shapeshift. Yes, shapeshift. As you traverse levels, you can scan fallen weaponry into your suit’s computer. Your gun can then shapeshift into any of the scanned weapons (well, up to three of them). Effectively, it’s like any other shooter – you just choose a gun from a slot – but the visual effect is pretty awesome.

Then, of course, you have the power suit. Typical SciFi gaming trope – if turns the puny scientist into a powerhouse. This suit is at the core of Vanquish’s cinematic magic. You see, the developers don’t want you to look at Vanquish as just a 3rd-person shooter, they are instead pushing it as an “action shooter” – as much about the movement as the shooting.

Vanquish is insanely fast-paced. Your suit has rockets built into the legs, and you use them to propel yourself from cover to cover and enemy to enemy. While you can certainly dive behind cover and fire at your enemies (and you should do this most of the time), but you can also just rocket yourself right into your foes. Vanquish has a variety of melee attacks that you can pull off. These melee moves are powerful, but tiring – they will quickly deplete your suit’s energy.

You’ll want to conserve some of that energy – you need it for the assisted-reaction system. This is essentially bullet time, you’ll slow down the world around you for a few seconds. You can fire it up at any time, but the system also has a passive component. If you’re about to die, your suit will activate the AR system, giving you a few precious seconds to escape or gun down some Russians.

The impressive parts of Vanquish aren’t necessarily the gameplay mechanics. I mean, it’s a cover-based shooter with bullet time. No, the truly interesting part of Vanquish is the movement – the speed and the cinematic physicality. It’s hard to get across in writing, but Vanquish is this crazy blur. This game is fast until it is slow. The best players will be those that can best control that movement. The strategy comes in setting the pace – deciding when to rocket, when to slow time, and when to sit safe behind cover.

Adding to this physicality are the environments. The levels are pretty varied, encompassing a number of interesting layouts and movement strategies. In one stage, Sam has to constantly push further uphill. The Russians have the high-ground, so the stage becomes this interesting mix of cautiousness and a need to constantly move forward. Oh, and if Russians weren’t enough, there are also giant spider-like robots.

Another level is set on a train track leading around the edge of the colony. The colony is a massive cylinder, and the train is on an open platform. Drones fly in at all angles, you don’t have much room to maneuver, and cover is scarce. These two levels were massively different, but each showed off different facets of the game’s interesting physicality.

If Vanquish were just another 3rd-person shooter, I’d be bored. I’ve already played Uncharted 2, thanks. However, by making the game about the movement – about this insane, controllable sense of pacing – they have created something genuinely interesting. Vanquish hits the Xbox 360 and PS3 in America this October.