It’s a third person cover shooter that actually takes advantage of being on console to use third person motion well, which is what the controller excels at where mouse and keyboard fall behind. They put a lot of work into making it so every part of the system has some function, many of them interrelated. Similar to FEAR, you can toss grenades, go into slo-mo and detonate them in the air. Grenades can be tossed from a rocket dash to get a lower angle. You can cancel reload animations by switching weapons. They have the cigarette to distract enemies and give you a chance to act out of cover. In general the game is really tuned around letting good players get out of cover, making cover more a crutch for players that let themselves get hit. The dodge function is brilliant at this, especially because you can dodge boost for more distance and staying mostly invincible. They let you jump out of cover, go into slo-mo to shoot while rocket boosting. The game really wants you to play the offensive.
The enemy designs are excellent in the way they’re varied and have a number of attack options. Even the basic enemies sometimes go into suicide mode to try to detonate on top of you if they’re low on life. They have bigger enemies and smaller enemies, some can fly, some roll around, some stand up and have weak points behind them. They have all different bosses that attack in different ways. Some literally unfold into mobile cover. The final boss battle has all this cover that comes out of the ground, and changes over the fight. They actually have good boss battles for a shooter game, which is rare by itself.
Beyond that, they actually offer a fair range of weapons with differentiation between them. Sure, the assault rifle, heavy machine gun, and boost machine gun overlap each other, but you also get the Shotgun, which rips apart anything at close range, the LFE, which is a slow moving orb of death which kills any lesser enemy, and stuns greater ones, rocket launcher, big damage, low ammo, disc launcher, has its own melee attack which doesn’t overhead you, can dismember multiple enemies close together, lock-on laser, can hit a bunch of targets at the same time, sniper rifle, snipes, Laser cannon, draws from the suit power for big damage, anti-armor pistol, slow accurate, low ammo, big damage, and the two types of grenades.
It's the benefit of being a game that isn't around "being realistic" or "authentic", you actually get to create a fucking game. Vanquish's many design principles are the stuff that make Doom n Mario excellent games, all these decades later. Mafia was a flavor of the month that people look back on fondly, because they don't really like games, they prefer really bad video game stories with a time kill attached to it.
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