I smoke, I joke, I kill: Ars reviews Vanquish

It’s rare to see a video game character smoking these days, unless they’ve been grandfathered in. I’m looking at you, Snake. Vanquish‘s Sam Gideon doesn’t care about being a role model, he slams a cancer stick in his mouth after every firefight and during cut scenes. There is a button that causes you to light a cigarette while hiding out behind cover. Be careful though; some enemies are attracted by the flame.

Gideon is wearing an experimental suit called ARS, the Augmented Reality Suit, and the ARS designation is prominently displayed on his chest. He has an attractive female handler who works for “Nature Nurtured,” and she helps him work through his issues with the suit as well as hacking various and sundry terminals. The camera is forever pinned to her legs. 

You can’t jump, but you can slide around the levels by activating a series of jets, a move that helps you to avoid the copious gunfire and missiles that flood each level. “Shoot anything bigger than a Roomba!” one character tells you after demolishing a series of robots.

If you don’t mind a whole lot of goofy things in a game, you’re going to love Vanquish.

Russians, weapon platforms, space operas

The story is out there. There is a huge station floating in space, tasked with creating energy for a world that is running out. After a coup in Russia puts the station in control of our enemies, it’s used as a weapon to glass San Francisco. A lengthy introductory cinema gives the game a very space-opera type vibe before you are given the job of taking the station back. A group of indistinguishable soldiers will help you.

The station is absolutely monstrous, with epic vistas and a spinning design that sometimes seems to put the ground where the sky should be. The sense of scale offers some of the coolest moments in the game, such as when a huge laser sweeps across the land and cuts entire buildings in two. In another, a battle between two train cars on elevated tracks goes crazy, one train twists above you, and the robots rain bullets down onto your position. This is to say nothing of some of the boss battles, where the enemies can stretch into the heavens. The voice acting may be amusingly cheesy, but the design of the levels, enemies, and set pieces is top notch. This is beautiful game, and you’ll often want to pause to admire what you’re seeing. Of course, if you do take a second to gape at your surroundings it will likely end with your becoming a red smear on the ground, but every now and again we all need to stop and die over the roses.

You move from battle to battle, taking cover, sliding on your butt when things get too hectic… but if you slide for too long your suit overheats. Take too much damage and things go into slow-motion, and you have to survive for a few seconds without taking much more damage; another hit or two in this condition will send you back to the last checkpoint. You’ll be fighting with a variety of weapons, and these are found in crates scattered around each area, marked in green on your radar.

In a delightful twist, if you pick up a rocket launcher when your existing rocket launcher has full ammo, it will be upgraded. This presents a nice cost-benefit quandary: should you pop the cherry on that clip, or keep it full and hope for an upgrade? You can only carry three weapons at a time, so you’ll have to plan ahead. You’re also given two types of grenades and melee attacks if you’d like to make things personal.

Vanquish

The game delights in the absurd, gruff-voiced characters chiding each other about the proper way a soldier should comport himself, and in one situation a character is told to pray that an environment will remain stable while you fight across it. “Thank God I’m an atheist,” he replies. It’s hard to not fall in love with a game so ruthlessly irreverent; where else are you going to hear war on a space station described as an “economic stimulus plan”?

Just because it makes things more complicated, you don’t pick up new guns; your weapon shifts into new configurations after you scan each gun. It’s a cool animation that is there just for eye-candy, as are many of the rippling animations that shift across your suit whenever you do anything. Hey, why not?

Things aren’t all rosy: there are bosses that can kill you with one hit, and you will fight them more than once. Quick-time events make an unwelcome appearance, but luckily they are kept to a minimum. We were of course asked not to talk about the fifth act, but what occurs there should be obvious by the end of the second. But who cares?