Vanquish is gorgeous and tons of fun... but is there enough content to justify a purchase?
Vanquish is heavily inspired by, but not derivative of, Gears of War. There's a cover system where you can duck into and move between cover easily, and the action your character will take if you press the A button is shown in little pictures at the bottom of the screen, just like in Gears. The similarities end there. When it comes to mobility, Vanquish beats Gears at its own game, granting you the ability to use your BLADE suit to boost-slide around levels at high speeds, injecting adrenaline and strategy to its intense firefights. You are also granted the ability to slow down time, a la Max Payne, which becomes very useful when you're being swarmed by waves of enemies.
Actually, "intense" seems to be a somewhat mild a word to describe the battles that go down in this game. What Vanquish brings to the table is basically a 3D version of classic "bullet hell" type shooters; games like Ikaruga or even Contra, where the screen is constantly full of multicolored bullets and you must always remain on the move in order to avoid death. The boss battles are grandiose and epic, and the game has a perfect difficulty curve, becoming more challenging as you become more accustomed to your abilities. Believe me when I tell you that there is literally never a dull moment. You'll have tons of fun dispatching wave after wave of mechs in all shapes and sizes.
And it's utterly beautiful. I mean, to be honest, all of the character models are drawn like anime stereotypes and aren't intricately detailed, but it doesn't matter because the world they inhabit and everything in it just looks so damn cool. Platinum Games went for artistic feel over realism in this game, and it suits it nicely. The colors are bright, the textures are lovely and the framerate is smooth, making this game utterly a joy to look at. There is just so much eye-candy everywhere you look, this game easily ranks among the prettiest on Xbox 360 to date.
As far as the story goes, it's neither terrible nor remarkable. The story is has to do with a sci-fi future war between the United States and Russian terrorists (who use robots instead of human soldiers for reasons that are never explained) with a massive satellite laser cannon. Saying anymore would be a spoiler in my book, but that's really all you need to know. It's an engaging story with a few twists and turns you may not see coming, and apart from a few corny so-bad-they're-not-funny-they're-actually-just-bad lines of dialogue, it's pretty good.
However, although the story got close to pulling me in several times, the voice acting was always there to come along and push me back out. I don't know what it is about Japanese games, but the voice acting is almost always universally terrible. I'm not saying Western games feature Oscar-worthy performances, but I would love to play a Japanese game where the voice actors sound at least as competent as those in Call of Duty or Splinter Cell or basically any other Western game you can mention. I don't know if they just grab some of their development people or maybe their friends and family and stick them in a vocal booth or what, but really, it's 2011. Get with the times. These voices sound like the really corner ones from back in the PlayStation days. Apart from the guy who plays Sam (he's sort of okay), everyone else will have you wanting to turn the subtitles on and lower the voice track completely. It's one of three complaints I have about this game.
The second is about your weapon's much-hyped ability to "scan" other weapons and change into them. This is, to put it politely, crap. It's a marketing ploy. You do indeed have a weapon which can "morph" into other weapons. But you can't scan any guns unless the game prompts you to. And the only times it will prompt you to is at ammo drops. And you CANNOT pick up guns or scan any guns that are just lying around from dead enemies. So the game that everyone thought would give you great freedom in managing your weapon inventory is actually MORE limiting when it comes to switching out weapons than your average shooter, most of which still let you pick guns up.
The final and most important problem I have with Vanquish is what I mentioned at the beginning: value. You see, the campaign in Vanquish ran me about seven hours, and that's after dying several times at this one boss with an annoying one-hit kill. That was playing it on Normal difficulty. Many of you may want to play the game on the hardest difficulty the very first time around which will result in A LOT of reloading checkpoints, but that's adding artificial length to the game: there are only seven hours of content in this game. You can do these time trial-like levels but they're an afterthought. Not having multiplayer was a SERIOUS omission for this game.
Now, I know what you're thinking reading this: how could a game in which bullet time is a major component of the gameplay possibly be played in multiplayer? Afterall, when a group of people play a game together, they're both playing in real time. It's impossible to make time seem slower for one of them while the rest are in regular time: they're all playing at the same instant. However, this game is intense and exciting even WITHOUT the bullet time component. They could've come up with a way to make it work. 2K Games managed to do it with BioShock in the sequel, another game which people said couldn't work in multiplayer, and that didn't feel tacked on or silly. Platinum Games should've done the same thing here.
As it stands, Vanquish, with its lack of multiplayer or co-op and a seven hour single player campaign, is simply not a $60 video game. That's probably why it dropped $20 off the price after only about a month of being on store shelves. Had it appeared at the $40 price point from launch, or if it had included a robust multiplayer mode to go along with its stellar single player mode, Vanquish would've sold more units and gotten a 9/10 from me. As it stands right now, I'd rate this game somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8.0: it's a great IP, just way too low on content to justify its original price.
*UPDATE: I wrote this review sometime around late 2010 and never posted it to GameSpot. As of right now, the game is available for about $28.00 at Amazon.com. This is a much better value for this game and basically makes the last paragraph of this review a moot point.