Vanquish's innovative gameplay elements help it stand out in the crowd along with an engaging story and good characters.
One of the key elements of Vanquish is the ton of new gameplay elements that it brought to the table of games design in term's of new mechanics, as well as refining some previous ones. The most noticeable original element was the rocket sliding mechanic. This allowed you to propel yourself across large battlefields very quickly to attain cover or activate that useful AI mode in order to slow down time and take more accurate shots at your enemy, resulting in stylish finish's and just feeling totally awesome! On top of that, the sliding mechanic will allow you to accurately swing round to the back of some of your less vulnerable enemies and shoot them from behind, this is most useful on KRB-0 Robots and the massive robotic trucks that have buzz saws attached to the front.
This new sliding mechanic has gone on to inspire future games such as Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, even Killzone 3, all of which have used some form of sliding mechanism in a similar way to vanquish. In vanquish, the sliding mechanic can be used for both defensive and offensive reasons. Once your hurt, AI mode kicks in to save you, and using your sliding mechanic you can quickly find cover nd wait to regenerate before continuing on. On the other hand, using it offensively to wipe out large amounts of enemies hiding away behind cover works just as effectively.
Vanquish also improves upon the basics of many other games. The cover system is the main example of this. The cover is easily destructible, one giant blast from a ragnarok should probably do the trick. This is to try and put emphasis on the new mechanics the game offers. Because of this, at the end of each mission you are deducted points depending on how much cover you used, lowering your ranking on the leader boards. this is a great way of getting those players who are score conscious to play your game the way you would like it to be played.
A problem with Vanquish's graphical capabilities, is that its limited to 720p. Its still HD, and looks bloody mavellous, but the rich detailed futuristic environments and the character models with the nice white colour pallete are just screaming out for more. 1080p to be exact. And as you'd expect from a console game, the lack of Anti Aliasing really pulls down the graphical prowess.
The main thing that stood out to me graphically was the attention paid to the little details on character models faces. Sam Gidgeon's beard looks close to real, and Burns' prosthetic arm, armed (pun intended) with a gigantic gatling gun and a large metal sheild, all have close detail paid to the textures. And the different colour palletes used for each character model really adds a feel of variety to the game.
The story, allthough most of it is hidden behind cutscenes waiting to be encoded by you, is a memorable one. Vanquish's story takes place in a not far off future were the human poplulation has grown so rapidly that it's left the worlds most powerful nations fighting for the remainder of scarce resources available. The US have launched a cylindrical space station above earth to try and gather solar resources using the suns energy. Back on earth however, the Russian government has been overtaken by a rebellist group, who call themselves the "Russian Star".
After the russians blow up san fransisco city back on earth using a new energy ray type weapon they aquired from the space station, the protagonist, Viktor Zaitsev, orders the US to come to a complete "unconditional" surrender, or he will choose New York as his next target.
you play as Sam, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) researcher who is first to try out a new kind of military weapon in the form of a suit known as the ARS, a cutting-edge peice of material including rocket boosters on the legs and arms. And this gives the US the perfect chance to test out the suit against the russians.
As you can see, vanquish really trys to set the scene with the first chapter, getting into the whole backstory of things and how the whole plot came to be. The plot continues to unravel as you play through the games measley 5 chapters, with a few friendly betrayals along the way, until you finally come to the ending, rather abruptly too. Unfortunately, vanquish only consists of 5 chapters, each having an average of 6 missions. This should last you around 6 hours, and unless you plan on beating the game on multiple difficulties or going for the platinum trophy, there really isn't much replay value to offer. You'll be left with an "oh, is that it?" feeling and just sit in your chair and wait for a sequel (Hint hint pinnacle studios?).
OVERALL:
Gameplay - 10
Graphics - 8
Story - 10
Replay Value - 6
Total - 8.5