Vanquish: Demo Impressions

Platinum Games is known for their over-the-top creations. With games like Bayonetta and Mad World, it's no surprise that Vanquish is as fast paced and stylized as it is. The game is a 3rd person cover based shooter with a focus on blazingly fast and stylish game play. The demo lets you play through a short level where it's action all the time and finish it off with a big boss battle.

It's wise to note that Vanquish is a new creation by Shinki Mikami, the creator of the original Resident Evil. The game revolves around Sam Gideon, a scientist for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) who uses a specialized suit called an Augmented Reaction Suit to battle evil Russian robots. Sam is surprisingly badass for a scientist, showing no fear when fighting robots and taking the chance to smoke whenever he can. This suit allows you to boost around the level while sliding on your knees like a robotic rock star, and slow down time using an ability called Augmented Reality Mode. The game also has a scoring aspect to it. You rack up points for getting headshots, killing enemies, and for overall time completed at the end of a level.

Using boost to get around the level is critical to your survival. Enemies will shoot at you constantly and bosses will unleash Robotech-like amounts to missiles. So you'll want to be getting to as fast as you can. The weapons in the game all come from one base called the BLADE system. As you find weapons on the battlefield you don't actually pick them up, the BLADE system scans them and then morphs into that gun. Also guns can be upgraded to hold more ammo by scanning the same type of weapon you are holding while at full ammo capacity or by finding an upgrade pickup that an enemy drops.

The look of the game is a very stylized futuristic look. Everything is very visually appealing from the BLADE system morphing into other guns, to the heat waves coming off your suit when you overheat from boosting or using slow mo too much. The games style also is reminiscent of another Shinji Mikami game that came out for the Gamecube called P.N.03.

The demo has gotten me hooked on the game play and I can't wait to see more when the game comes out October 19th this year.