Vanquish, it is a bit like every bit of amazing in the world ever, vol 2

[twmac]

I have searched high and low, I apologise if some how I missd the thread related to Vanquish after searching 'Shinji', 'Vanquish' and 'Platinum' but as far as I was concerned there does not seem to be a discussion for this game.

If I am wrong, fair enough.

Holy fucking shit, this game is amazing. I haven't finished it yet so it might Bayonetta me by having three levels at the end that suck but right now the game has absolutely blown my mind.

You can try and approach the game as a gears of war clone, or you can try and go ape-shit with the boosters but the game constantly encourages you to do a bit of both. It is truly one of the best games for balancing reward and risk that I have ever experienced. The visual fidelity is phenomenal to boot, from a forced fire fight up a destroyed highway (while a giant mech throws debry at you) to the mind bending train shoot outs this game never falters.

I will concede that a lot of what it is doing has been done in other games but never at this level and never to the point that I am grinning inanely, waiting for the next set piece.

As I said before, Holy Shit, this game makes me giddy.

[toblix]

Except for the title, I give this thread and will without delay buy both this and Bayonetta. Thanks!

[twmac]

The title is a riff on those terrible compilations from the 90's. I had one and it was called 'The greatest Rock Album, ever, vol 2'. I was 13 at the time and it sounded dumb to me then. And Vanquish is dumb and not in the slightest bit original if you put the concepts down on paper but somehow it feels utterly refreshing while playing because it just does everything really well.

I played it for about an hour last night and I really am overwhlemed, the story is rubbish but the cut scenes keep me watching because of their realisation.

This is a minor gripe but when the action slows down for a few seconds I did notice some screen tearing, not for it to be distracting but enough for me to notice.

[lobotomy42]

I played the demo and loved it, but am poor. So once this becomes $30 or so I will get it.

[Irishjohn]

I have downloaded the demo...

Now I will play it!

[twmac]

*Bump*

I wrote an equally gushing review.

It has GOTY.CX written all over it.

[Raff]

I quite liked it too. It is a bit short for full price though, I've not felt compelled to replay it and the challenges are way too hard for me.

[twmac]

Really? The length wasn't an issue from me given that the game is just so damn good. I'd happily pay full price for a well rounded but only 7 hours worth of game than play a 40 hour RPG that drags constantly.

I have definitely reached the point where I am willing to spend money on a quality experience and not worry about whether that will be over after a weekend.

I am replaying it again on a harder difficulty, which isn't something I am prone to doing often.

[Nachimir]

This went straight on my Christmas list after reading a review and seeing a few people talk about it so persistently on Twitter.

[Raff]

Really? The length wasn't an issue from me given that the game is just so damn good. I'd happily pay full price for a well rounded but only 7 hours worth of game than play a 40 hour RPG that drags constantly.

I have definitely reached the point where I am willing to spend money on a quality experience and not worry about whether that will be over after a weekend.

I am replaying it again on a harder difficulty, which isn't something I am prone to doing often.

Sure, but this is hardly Portal. Obviously when I say it's too short I don't just mean it should be stretched out, but it definitely felt like a piece of a game that deserved to be more ambitious. It introduces little more than a handfull of new enemies in its entirety let alone any new mechanics, they could have done a lot more with it.

[twmac]

You said the P word! (am playing it now as I never finished it)

Although the enemies don't vary, how you approach them does. Even on normal there is a constant flux on what strategy you endorse. Certainly, you can try and just play it as a cover shooter and you can force your way through the game but there are way more fun ways to play it, with hidden weapons and strategies for each set piece.

On hard, things are already very different, I can no longer stay in my comfort zone with each fire fight and am constantly having to use different weapons to stay alive. Shit, I only just learnt that the disc thrower doesn't use up your ARS energy when you use it as a close combat weapon.

[miffy495]

Thead-surrection!

I bought this for $40 on Amazon a week or so ago and have played to halfway through act 4 on Normal difficulty. Given how it started out, I was starting to be a bit disappointed, but as the difficulty has ramped and I've been forced to carefully manage my heat meter while flipping all over the place and doing ridiculous things, I've started to really love this game. I picked it up mostly to psych myself up for Shadows of the Damned coming out next month and wanting to catch up on Mikami stuff, and the excellence on display here has certainly done that.

[Sno]

Oh, hey, Vanquish. This is a game i played.

I really wanted to love Vanquish, but i had some problems with the game. Fairly small nit picks, mind you, but enough to keep it from being a great game in my mind.

I mean, was anybody else bothered by how seriously disjointed the campaign was? They kept breaking up the flow of the game with cutscenes. You'd play for five minutes, be interrupted by a cutscene, be dropped into a new area that is completely disconnected from the previous one, play for five more minutes, see another cutscene, etc, etc. I came to realize how important something like walking from one battle to the next can be for establishing a sense of place and progression, Vanquish really just felt like a lot of completely arbitrary arcade-style scenarios. (Which, to be fair, seemed to be partly what they were going for, but i think it's at odds with the what the end product actually is.)

Man, and a lot of the time the cutscenes were showing you action that wasn't even out of the realm of what the in-game gameplay can do. I found it incredibly frustrating that they kept depicting things that should have been playable.

I also thought the weapon upgrade system was incredibly counter-intuitive and dumb, that really, really bothered me. (The only way to upgrade your weapons was to have full ammo in them when collecting pick-ups, therefore, you cannot upgrade any weapon you actually use. Dumb.)

I mean, small issues though, i did really love the pace and style of that game. Once you get a handle on the mechanics and how they meant for the game to be played, it's just complete madness, it's really amazing. Never would have imagined that a cover based shooter could be so fast and frantic. Would love to see those game systems iterated on in a more fully developed sequel, but that probably won't happen.

[miffy495]

Actually, I've found the weapon upgrade system to be really nice. My two most used weapons, by far, are the assault rifle and heavy machine gun. By halfway through the third act, I had both totally maxed out. Didn't even take that much to do so, just a bit of planning on my way into certain fights. I find also that it encourages me to be much more judicious in what I assign to my third weapon slot.

The only time I've felt that the transition from one area to another was particularly disjointed so far was between acts 3 and 4, where you go from skyscraper to forest with little to no explanation. At that point though, I was happy just to see all the beautiful greenery and didn't care. As for the cutscenes being frustrating for doing what you yourself can do as well, I half agree with you. Only half because I've actually found that they give me ideas and make me a better player. I'll be going through one way for a while, see a cutscene, think "Oh shit, I can do that?" and then start working that maneuver into my tactics.

Anyway, super excited to get home in a few hours and pick it up again. Want to get to at least act 5 before going to work tomorrow afternoon.

[miffy495]

So I beat this game about 4 hours after writing that post, but haven't bothered to come back to the thread until about now. Holy shit does the story in this game ever take a massive left turn around the "30 minutes to go" mark. Seriously? The final cutscene includes the president of the United States

blowing her own brains out across the flag?

What the fucking shit happened? Regardless, the final battle against two other soldiers in the same ridiculous kit that you have is fucking fantastic. In the end, the only thing that I wish were different about this game is that I want more variety in my enemies. It's fine to blow up a bunch of robots, but almost every boss fight was just against increasing numbers of Argus mechs, and you have already fought one of them by the end of the first chapter. It gets crazy, don't get me wrong, but I wish they'd throw a little more different at me. Still, that's my only complaint. I really can't recommend this game enough to anyone looking for a new fast-paced shooter. I haven't played Bulletstorm, but this is the kind of game that I hoped that was and the reviews told me it wasn't. Check it out if you want to see the concept done fantastically well.

[Nachimir]

I had a lot of trouble with this game at first. The first Argus kept killing me over and over, and it took a while for me to get how the movement and cover work together. I was trying to play it like Gears of War, but the massive one hit kill beam sometimes goes through cover, and sometimes doesn't. Then I tried boosting around like a nutter and kept getting killed quickly.

Balancing the two took a while, but I've progressed to flanking enemies with boosts then getting kills pretty quickly. It's gone from hating this to just now finding myself grinning while shouting "In your pointless fucking face!" at the fragments of one of the big robots that can boost

Edit: It also has

the Wilhelm Scream in the cutscene just before you fight Zaitsev for the first time. Excellent.

Edited May 19, 2011 by Nachimir

[Nachimir]

Ooof. Finally got back to this and completed it.

Like you Miffy, I relied on heavy machine gun and assault rifle, plus sniper. By the end of the game, I was finding the LFE very useful for knocking down bigger enemies then wailing on them with melee or the machine gun. Likewise, the lock on laser was really useful sometimes, I just wish there were easier ways to level more weapons up.

I only managed the final fight by levelling up the rocket launcher every time I died, then using it to take out the red guy first. It took me 13 attempts, that's quite the difficulty spike.

With regard to the WTF moment you spoiler tagged above, indeed. That wider part of the plot and its delivery are just a tiny bit better than the hammy melodrama of Crackdown, but only a little.

[miffy495]

I'm surprised you had as much trouble as you did with that final boss. I think it's a bit of a spike (I died twice) but not anything drastically beyond what the game had prepared you for by that point. I was able to get through it with liberal knee slides and dodge rolls, and being incredibly economical with my heat levels, right up until the game said "hey, we're disabling your heat limiters" and then going ape-shit. It felt like a really satisfying capper to the experience.

Following finishing this game, I stopped by a "we sell games for any system ever" store a few blocks from my house and found a copy of P.N.03 for $10. Picked it up as Vanquish was awesome and I wanted to check out the game it is supposedly a successor to. That game is balls-hard. Holy crap did it every kick the shit out of me on the first level. Has anyone put a good deal of time into it? How did you make it click?

[twmac]

Good to see some other people had fun with Vanquish and that I was not alone.

As for the levelling system, I just relied on the assault rifle and sniper. On my second play through I levelled up the rocket launcher, it makes some of the boss fights a joke. Don't know if I mentioned it before but the cutter seems like a shit weapon, it isn't meant for shooting and is the only weapon that you can melee with without over heating your suit.

The Ending was hammy as hell but I couldn't stop laughing.

[Nachimir]

Do you mean the disc launcher? Yeah, the only thing I found that useful for was dealing with multiple

flying marines

near the end, and even then only because I had nothing better to hand such as a lock on.

While they were frustrating at first, I did come to enjoy the fights against

the "Unknown" things. The way the core would scuttle off by itself was quite a silly thing to put in there with such a sinister enemy, which made me laugh a lot. Every time I got the core to run around, I'd EMP then melee it, which takes them down very fast.

At quite a few points in the game, I found I'd fail catastrophically and repeatedly until I tried a different weapon and method.

[twmac]

That's the one I meant.

The game can really make you switch between the different weapons, especially on the harder difficulties that don't allow you to grind the levelling system (given that you drop down huge amounts of levels when you die).

Man, I really need to get back to that game.

[Wrestlevania]

I've almost finished the game, having picked it up for cheap before Christmas.

Personally, I love the wildly veering plot line and locations; war factory one minute, crash landing in a forest the next, then onto the zero-gravity innards of a massive power generator - love it.

The ridiculous characterisations have been excellent, too. There's a tongue firmly planted in cheek in almost every bit of dialogue, although I do agree that the couple of twists near the end leant too far towards trying to be meaningful for a change. It's like the writers wrapped things up, then thought, "actually this is all about genocide and super powers - we should probably include something 'significant' before the end."

Anyway, I've really enjoyed the chunky, tactile mechanics throughout, and the graphical style and flourishes are brilliant. So many times during the game, I've stopped and thought, "this is exactly how I thought games would be in The Future!" back when I was a kid playing 16-bit stuff, which really made me smile. (I didn't find the upgrade system to be particularly irritating either, incidentally, though needing to have your gun fully loaded before you can upgrade it does seem stupid.)

The only problem I have with the game is that I'm now stuck (I think) right at the very end, fighting those two (why suddenly two?!) flying dudes. I'm able to whittle them down to half energy no problem, and have fun doing it. But then it flips into a split-second-perfect QTE and I always fuck it up!

I just don't have the timing or reactions for this sort of stuff, and it's really frustrating to be so close and yet blocked every time by something so arbitrary. I had no real trouble with the earlier QTEs throughout, but this one seems extra-pedantic.

[Nachimir]

How long have you been trying? It is a ball busting difficulty spike of meat factory circus proportions. I think I had to read a couple of strategy guides then persevere for an hour or so, but it's possible. I have never screamed such a hearty "fuck you" at any other Video game antagonist.

Edited February 27, 2012 by Nachimir

[miffy495]

You're on the last boss. Yeah, to that point you could kind of scrape by by just being pretty good with the basics of the mechanics, but to beat this guy you need to be in full contol of everything. Man, did it ever feel amazing to beat him though.

[Nachimir]

(I meant meat circus, of course)

All I can remember:

Learning the arena and all the cycles in which pieces of cover change was vital, along with a lot of running away. I think the arena has three states.

Focussing entirely on one of them until he was dead, before even trying to shoot the other, was the only way I could last.

Once I'd got those things down, I only had to fail the final QTE a couple of times before finishing it.

I think that the endless retrying and deaths also meant that I could use some of the ammo near the arena start to repeatedly and fully upgrade weapons I hadn't really bothered with. I'd specialised in the assault rifle and machine gun all the way through the game, but think I switched to rockets for a lot of this.