Vanguish - A 'single evening' review

This is literally copy-pasted from thestudentreview.co.uk, which by the way is an awesome site, but seeing as I am credited for writing it I don't see a problem. I wrote this back in March 2011 (just before the release of pokemon black and white) so it could be a little out of date but whatever, enjoy. (I have updated some of the captions, however)

A singular Hoppip

Friday was the release of Pokemon White and Pokemon Black. I’d been deluding myself for most of the week that I would play through and review this game for TSR, however when I realised it was Thursday there was then a higher chance of a 1980s punk silently passing through a metal detector than there was me choosing to play a “third-person-over-the-shoulder-Gears-of-War-probably-did-it-better” shooter when I could instead obsess over my Pokemon team consisting of six Hoppip. That’s why it’s a ‘single evening’ review.

Vanquish, as in to arise victorious from a conflict, is a game about shooting robots while countless bullets and missiles practically blend into the scenery. To coin a term, it is in all senses a “bullet hell” shooter, where the screen is more often than not filled with projectiles whizzing past your body as you dive behind the cover of a chest-high wall. Then you realise the bullets could just as well be replaced with wet sponges, wrecking up the robots’ circuitry yet not even leaving you out of breath. I suppose this all comes down to your character being an unstoppable hero.

Sam Gideon. He's no Hoppip.

Oddly enough, the main character is known as Sam Gideon. He’s a chain smoker with a voice like a tractor engine who spends his spare time thinking up one liners and trimming his perfect little beard. Oh, and he’s also the guinea pig for his own creation, an Augmented Reaction Suit, and yet the woman who patronizes you throughout the tutorial makes it sound as if you’d never even stood up and walked before, let alone designed a technologically advanced suit!

The suit itself is the fun part of the game; using an unlabelled form of propulsion, Sam becomes capable of sliding long distances at high speeds on his knees, performing various acrobatic moves, and embarrassing himself in front of the ladies. It’s very reminiscent of Will McKenzie from The Inbetweeners. The suit can also release an electric shock which somehow helps wounded allies – because as everybody knows, the best thing for a guy who just stood on a landmine is few thousand volts to the heart. Yeah, that’ll perk him up a bit.

The suit also augments Sam’s reactions, allowing him to enter a state of mind where everything he perceives happens at a reduced speed, including his own movement. Well, everything except for his bullets, which still move at the same speed as before, so the science behind it is really quite heavily flawed. Just like his suit in fact, which tries its very best to overheat so you can play fair with the other kids for the 10 seconds it takes to cool off. There are massive inconsistencies in the amount of energy output necessary for it to overheat – you can glide along the floor for about 5 seconds before it overheats, but then the propulsion necessary to perform a single enhanced punch supposedly has an equal energy output, also causing an overheat. Of course, it only overheats if you actually land the punch, despite the punch still being boosted…

I seem to have gone from speaking about the basics of Sam’s character to listing the features of the gameplay, so I’ll just continue with that and perhaps come back later to the ridiculous plot and the characters trapped within. In terms of weaponry in the game then, there is a small variety of guns and thus a heavy focus on improving and upgrading them. The method of upgrading is certainly unique, if rather silly; you use guns dropped by enemies or found in supply boxes in order to upgrade the guns in your inventory (your inventory only consists of three spaces for guns along with a grenade pouch, allowing you to change the type of gun you want to use mid-battle by tapping a direction on the d-pad). Crucially though, you can also only upgrade a gun if your ammo stock is full for that gun, otherwise the weapon on the floor just replenishes the shotgun shell you unloaded into a robot’s metallic face moments earlier, and then of course you’ve got to pick up a certain amount of the same weapon when you already have full ammo for that weapon in order for it to finally upgrade. This basically means that if you are like me and use the assault rifle an awful lot more than other guns, you’ll find all your other weapons upgrading exponentially and your rifle becoming less and less effective against the strengthening enemies. So it’s an upgrade system that upgrades weapons you don’t use. Superb!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (all kneesliding is optional)

Moving swiftly on to the AI, for those who aren’t so familiar with gaming there are both friendly AI and enemy AI. The friendlies are obviously the ones on your side, from your nameless support troops to the character whose lack of helmet gives them distinguishing features, their own voice actor and probably means they are going to betray you at some point. The enemy AI characters act as the opposition, attempting to prevent you from progressing and thus adding the element of fun to the game. These enemy AI are quite remarkable though, ironically using human tactics in order to fight you. They will ambush you, surround you, stand behind cover in pairs and try to minimise their losses for as long as possible.

The friendly AI on the other hand, oh boy do they have a grudge against Sam (I theorise this is due to a fear of health issues developed from passive smoking). They will hide behind the cover of chest-high walls while I try to snipe some enemy peering above a turret, humming and using the barrels of their rifles to pick their noses whilst enemies charge past them and shoot the dude with the camera floating above his shoulder. On other occasions they will trip over their shoelaces and beg to be electro-revived from the other side of the battlefield. When I get them back on their feet, they’ll gleefully wait for me to walk near some explosive barrels and decide that now would be a good time to test if the safety is still on – now Smoking Sam’s nickname is correct in two ways.

On that note, a quick disclaimer. I’ve gabbed on about Sam’s smoking a few times now, and it’s not that I have a problem with people who smoke, it’s just that in this game it gets pretty ridiculous. The developers try to use the smoking to make Sam look cool and manly, but it just falls flat when coupled with his stupid voice and how little he actually smokes of each cigarette. There is even a ‘take a break’ action where you hide behind cover, tap the left bumper and Sam removes his helmet before lighting and taking a single puff from one cigarette before throwing it away.

Speaking of throwing things, grenades are absolutely horrific in this game. Whenever Sam uses a grenade he thinks it appropriate to perform a star jump before allowing himself to throw it, and the grenades themselves seem to swap randomly between bouncy balls and cannonballs, either ricocheting frantically around the room or thudding half a metre in front of you.

Now this pokemon battle is hardly fair, my geodude doesn't stand a chance!

 So next up, the boss battles! In the past these have made me view a game in a good light despite bad controls, story and graphics. Ultimately, I can decide whether a game is truly worth playing just because of a single epic fight. The first boss battle in this game arrives within the first 20 minutes of play and I actually had lots of fun against it. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that I found it exhilarating. This is where the fun of the suit mechanics really kicks in – sliding around a monolithic robotic invention, it turns slowly to lock onto you, only for you to whip back around to where you were moments before. All bosses have weak points and this is game doesn’t stray from the tried and tested formula; areas of the body – its limbs, if you will – glow bright orange and can be shot at, reducing their individual health bars. When you reduce a limb’s health bar to nothing the contraption collapses, momentarily unable to support itself, revealing its core. This doesn’t seem like a very good design feature to incorporate into robots you want to use to win a war, but oh well. You’ll then have a moment to shoot at that area and lower the boss’ true health before the core disappears back to safety and the robot rises once more.

The tricky part then is that the glowing area you just damaged no longer glows orange and is much more resistant to damage, meaning you need to focus on a different limb in order to take another chunk of the boss’ health out. This can be somewhat aggravating, for example when I had just emptied an entire clip into the boss’ arm; it fell over and was back up again before I’d finished reloading. “Alright”, I thought, “my own fault – I’ll shoot the next limb down to a tiny fraction of health, reload and then have almost a full clip to obliterate the core with.” This plan proved to not be quite as foolproof as I first thought, as my so-called ‘friendly AI’ decided it wanted to play yet another prank and fired into the leg milliseconds before I started reloading. The machine only had 4 limbs and with two of the opportunities wasted it was inevitable that I’d end up having to shoot an already-destroyed area, which turned out to be about as easy as cutting down a tree by throwing pebbles at the trunk.

Now, I’ve practically written an essay about the game mechanics and barely even touched upon its crappy story, detestable characters or clichéd script. And actually, I really don’t want to. You know why? I couldn’t tell whether it wanted to be serious at all or not. The game opened with a scene in which the innocent citizens of an American city are being attacked by an unknown power. A later scene depicted small battalions of unnamed soldiers apparently bravely holding ground as others escaped to fight another day. Then they plonked in a scene where a ridiculously muscular guy wielding a mini-gun gracefully dodges millions of bullets whilst climbing a narrow staircase with no safety rails before saying something along the lines of “Hasta la vista, baby”. Oh, and I should also mention that despite all the enemies you fight being robots, the true antagonist is actually Russia, which is by far the most ridiculous aspect to include in your plot if it’s not set before the Cold War. Well, second to the main protagonist (a man with a curly moustache) eventually being revealed as some sort of Nazi officer. And even then they’d probably feel the need to throw in a Russian accent, just to make sure!