Following on from the success of Bayonetta in early 2010, Platinum Games released their next project at the back end of the year. Could lightning strike twice for the talented Japanese studio?
Yes, it most certainly could.
Telling the story of Sam Gideon, a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Vanquish tasks you with rescuing a scientist who was working on the O’Neill Cylinder Space Station when it was hijacked by Russia. Russia are holding the USA to ransom, destroying San Francisco and targeting New York next unless the Americans comply with their wishes – total surrender.
Got all that? Right now forget all about it and SHOOT THOSE ROBOTS!
Vanquish is not a story based game, it’s a brilliant gameplay experience but what little story it has is wonderfully absurd and hardly tied to the game itself.
Sam has a mechanical suit that allows you to take plenty of damage but also enter a form of the ‘witch-time’ that appeared in Bayonetta. Whenever you trigger it time slows to a crawl and your shots deal a lot more damage. It also triggers automatically if you are about to die, giving you some valuable extra seconds to finish off the enemies or find some cover.
Whilst the gameplay does repeat itself – take cover, kill a load of robots, move on, take cover, kill a bigger robot etc – there is just enough variety in enemy type and setting to keep the game from becoming stale.
It also helps that it’s fairly short, coming in between 5 and 6 hours for the campaign.
Vanquish is certainly an experience I’d recommend and for a few sessions of a couple of hours each it is a blast to play. It doesn’t quite have the same depth as Bayonetta with regard to the characters but it can hold it’s head high in terms of a single player experience.
Rating: 7/10
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