Vanquish. Vanquished.

Finally got off my arse and finished Vanquish the other day, so thought it best that i worte up my thoughts on it.  In essence, the gameplay is fun but lacks anything to send it into the innovative category, the difficulty is tough and the story is bat shit crazy and almost impossible to follow.

Some of the most enjoyable moments come from the boss fights that have a real one more go quality about them.  All of them are tough, and basically rely on the same combo of run away, shoot lots, scream at the television that they must be dead by now, run away, shoot some more.  The main difference to this is if you have the rocket launcher, which does an absolutely massive amount of damage to most things, to the point it seems like cheating to use it.  It scratches a similar itch to Lost planet 2, where the ridiculousness of the bigger and bigger boss battles with the one weak point you need to shoot.  But Lost Planet 2 was better in that sense, the akrid were just so huge you felt you needed to shoot them that long, in Vanquish, it often seems like shooting for shootings sake.

Visually the whole thing is impressive, but i never felt like i was really invested in the whole thing.  The story was so all over the place it ended up lacking any real context at all, and i think that was really to its detriment.  On playing the demo I had high hopes for this and was quite excited to play it, and now I’ve finished i can’t help but feel a little bit meh about it, which was not what i was expecting.