E3(#e3) Reflections-Vanquish

Now that I’m back in a real city(sorry LA) I can think properly and I will be reflecting in depth on the games that were played at E3.

"You mad?"

One of the games that stood out to me was VANQUISH™. This game is directed by Shinji Mikami, the creator of the Resident Evil series. The story if you’re interested takes place on a vast space station in a near future world where nations war over the planet’s remaining energy resources. Against this backdrop, players take the role of Sam Gideon, a government agent kitted out with a futuristic battle suit. A versatile fighter with a huge arsenal of weaponry at his disposal, Sam also has an array of martial arts skills that he can use to take down his robot enemies.

The game is very smooth running at 60 frames per second. So the combat is very quick and arcade like. The game’s look reminds me a bit of the other popular Sega title Phantasy Star Online. The graphics of this game were some of the best I’ve seen at E3. The special effects made you feel like you were in a movie a bit. The presentation of this game is worth a pick up so you can check it out. Even though this was a demo and I hope in the finished version there is way more enemy diversity because I did get tired of shooting red Russian robots.

The actual game play if I were to describe it was a bit Gears of War, a bit Max Payne/Wet and a little Bayonetta.Rocket sliding into cover or sliding into a robot to shotgun them was intense. You get a real feeling of speed as you do it. The melee combat was not too in-depth you have a standard combo with a area clearing move at the end of it. I don’t you’re supposed to be punching the Russian Robots. The main method of dispatching is supposed to be gunfights I assume because you have so many options with guns. A neat feature they added is that your gun transforms on screen rather than switching to a different gun. The game features a ‘bullet-time’ like mode where things slow down. This either happens when you’re sliding into cover or sliding around in general. Also it happens when you’re dying. What’s to stop you from spamming that slow down function when you’re not dying? You have a bar that determines when you can use it. I have to see what this game will be like on harder difficulties because on normal and easier modes better players will probably never die.

With sound quite honestly I don’t remember anything from this game. It didn’t stand out much. It seemed generic so it doesn’t get in the way of the action. Maybe in the home release there will be more memorable tracks.

Replay seems a bit sketchy with this game. With only one playable character, it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to run through this game again. I can assume that there will be leader board functions and time attack modes due to what the Sega press kit says:

“VANQUISH will rate players on a variety of statistics, rewarding them for quick reflexes and strategic thinking, ensuring they will want to play the levels again and again.”

I asked the rep and he tried to be mysterious and say no comment. I am going to hope there might be some DLC for this game maybe featuring a new character model or maybe some monsters/robots. I would definitely play through this game once just to see how crazy the game could be.