Vanquish (2010) Game Review

Pure Third Person Shooter Action 

I have to admit, I have played a very few third person shooter titles, like Dead Space and Resident Evil 4. Those games were pretty good, but they were more centered in the terror and the atmosphere. When a friend of mine showed me the Vanquish trailer he sounded very excited, but when I saw it I didn't felt like that.

I just don't like to judge a game by its trailer, but when I watched it for whatever reason the first thing that came to my mind was Halo. Maybe was for the armor, maybe was for the reverse space colony kind-of-world. Anyway, playing the game is nothing like Halo. This game gives you tons of action right in your face, it kind of reminded me the old school Contra games... yeeeah, good times where nothing really mattered, just kill, kill, kill till you reach the end of the level, fighting a boss at the end.

In Vanquish, we are set into a futuristic world where you gotta fight against a russian guy (yeah, still living in the cold war). Along your way you find different weapons, similar to Contra, which you will use to destroy an infinite army of robots. I think they thought it would be a little gory to kill human targets, but anyway, is very satisfying killing these machines.

This game is everything about action, theres not a single level where something isn't exploding, which is very cool, however, today standards force you to partner that action with an interesting storyline, which Vanquish doesn't have.

There's the good guy and the badguy and thats pretty much it. The story is completely forgettable and that makes the game forgettable. Thanksfully, that doesn't ruin the overall experience of the game, because is good enough to keep you playing, and keep you shooting and keep you killing.

The levels may be kind of repetitive but it didn't bother me, I never got bored of destroying those robots minions. The bosses in the other hand get recycled many many times and that's lame. But in the end, this game doesn't try to innovate in any sense, is just an over the top version of every generic third person shooter game and I sure enjoyed it. The rest may be an unintentional copy of other things, like Halo for the space colony, the ultra-nacionalist russians just makes me think in Modern Warfare and it might be just my imagination, but the main character, Sam, is pretty damn similar to Snake from the Metal Gear series.

Seriously, just imagine him wearing an eye patch every time he smokes

In the end, Vanquish is a game thats gonna be remembered by the idea of its action instead of its gameplay, story or characters. Even so, early in the game I predicted one plot twist which I'm not gonna spoil, but is very probable that you could predict it too.

A very entertaining game, but nothing mindblowing. I'm looking forward to a Vanquish 2 with a deeper plot and memorable characters.

An entertaining game to spend some time with your friends