Xbox 360

Batman: Arkham Asylum – Critical Miss #27

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Photo by Dark Lord 21. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

Mook Repellant Batgloves

For some reason, I thought 30 years old was a perfect time to get into comic books. This is partly due to covid and looking for more things to occupy my time inside, but the interest mostly stemmed from my interest in the style of storytelling and the ubiquity of comics. I’ve always seen comics as a sort of modern mythology mixed with soap operas—everyone knows Batman, Spider-Man, Superman; their backstories, characters, and motivations, but they are still products designed to be sold, with ongoing stories and with more twists and turns than a mountain road. But superhero video games have always been a mixed affair with most ranging from terrible to alright and few ever breaking the surface to be considered great. While I have never been the biggest fan of Batman—and even now my knowledge about him comes mostly from the movies rather than the comics—Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum release in 2009 is still considered to be one of the best superhero games ever made.

The game opens with Batman transporting a recently captured Joker through the rain to Arkham Asylum. He has a bad feeling that Joker is plotting something and he is right, for as soon as they bring him to the maximum security cell, Joker springs his trap. He takes control over the facility and escapes, leaving Batman to recapture him, save everyone in danger, and foil his new scheme to creating an army with his Titan formula which turns people into Bane-like monsters—all brawn and no brain, hulking forms of muscle, anger, and spiked bones poking out of flesh. As you unravel the Joker’s plan, you are taken across all of the Arkham Asylum grounds and buildings, meeting friends and foes alike, and seeing some clever references to bad guys not in the game like the cell covered in ice holding Mr. Freeze. 

Overall the story is fine, a little more comic booky than most of the live action movies with more convoluted plot and embrace of Batman’s weirder enemies like Killer Croc. The art design seems like a more grounded take on the Burton with the Asylum being made up of gothic style buildings on an island seemingly drenched in everpresent rain and nighttime. The voice acting varies wildly though. Mark Hamill as the Joker is fantastic, but the Joker himself can get irritating with his constant popping up in Batman’s comms to mock and berate him. The voice acting for Harley Quinn is also extremely well done, but I find myself annoyed with her character overall and Batman sounds bored and silted throughout the adventure. This could be due to the fact that Batman as a character is a poster boy for the term “stick up his ass” and the voice actor was playing into his unbending stoicism. Or it could be due to the fact that the in-game conversions themselves feel very jarring since there’s also a second or two pause between lines as the camera changes speakers. It’s disappointing since the pre-rendered cutscenes are great with the character models being top-notch and the direction flowing smoothly.

There are two major aspects of Batman’s character that Rocksteady seemed eager to explore in Arkham Asylum: Batman’s prowess as the best hand-to-hand combatant in the world and his title of the world’s greatest detective. But while they seemed earnest to show both sides of this Batcoin, neither aspect feels fleshed out enough to ultimately succeed.

Photo by Duel44. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

Batman’s line of work means he has to be ready at a moment’s notice to start punching mooks in the face. In Arkham Asylum he can punch, counter, stun enemies with a whoosh of his cape, and use a couple gadgets for long distance stuns. The timing for attacking and countering enemies is strict enough to require concentration, but forgiving enough to not be frustrating. This helps the simplistic combat to stay engaging to some extent, but it does start to feel repetitive and boring near the end of the game. The combat overall just doesn’t feel expressive enough for me. Compared to a spectacle fighter like a Devil May Cry, the combos are lacking with not enough moves to perform for me to carve out my own style. The worst part is the combo meter. It increases to more attacks you make without taking damage or too much time passing between attacks, but there is no way to string attacks together when enemies get spaced out. While games like DMC and Bayonetta offer ranged weapons to keep a combo going while closing the distance from enemies, Arkham Asylum doesn’t offer anything like this, meaning it’s harder than it should be to build a high combo. These issues with combat also bleed into the boss fights—probably the worst past of the game.

Batman has the widest and most well known rogue’s gallery in comics, but most of his foes cannot stand up to him in a fist fight, instead hoping to outsmart him or evade him while orchestrating cunning plans. So how does an action game incorporate enemies like Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, or Joker into a boss fight? Unfortunately, the answer is poorly. The first boss fight in Arkham Asylum is Bane, a beast of a man juiced up on Venom making his physical strength second to none. While the game never touches on Bane’s intellect that rivals even Batman’s, it’s a fitting first boss in the game because it sets the prototype for the rest of them. With Joker injecting his henchman—and even himself for the final fight—with Titan, most fights are just other hulking pseudo-Banes, usually with a smattering of mooks in the room for good measure. While Harley Quinn’s boss section is fighting round after round of goons and Poison Ivy’s fight is goon-based too, but with a giant plant in the background you sometimes have to toss a Batarang at. Poison Ivy’s boss fight was tedious and boring, but not quite as bad as Killer Croc’s where you walk across floating platforms in the Arkham sewers and smack Croc with a Batarang anytime he pops up like a naughty puppy with a newspaper. Scarecrow’s sections are much better being hallucinatory nightmare sequences as you stealth around a giant version of him trying to find you. But the rest of the boss fights in the game feel much too similar, dull, and overlong with the only positive being that combat feels tricky enough that beating one always feels satisfying.

The detective aspect of Batman’s character feels undercooked as well. Most of the investigations in the game just require the player to switch on detective mode, finding a scent or fingerprint trail, and following it throughout the facility. Detective mode drowns out the art design in a digital blue haze and makes everything look the exact same. There are no logic or detection puzzles for the player to solve while doing investigation, no grand schemes for them to unravel themselves, they just need to follow the trail until the next cutscene advances the story. 

Photo by Duel44. Found at arkhamcity.fandom.com

There are Riddler puzzles to solve and these are a highlight of the games. Riddler, as a character, is only interested in Batman in order to prove he is smarter than him. There are two types of Riddler collectible to find: trophies, which require exploration and using Batman’s gadgets to find, and the puzzles, which the Riddler gives you clues for things in an area to find and requires the player to scan to solve. These can be almost anything: statues, portraits, radios, plaques. These were always fun to look out for and to solve because it felt like a P.I. out on the case and finding clues. I didn’t bother finding them all because the stiff movement in the game was becoming tiring by the end. There seems to be a weightiness in the 7th gen of video games, but I’m not sure if that has to do with the engines or consoles the games were designed for or if it’s just because I’m not used to the chunkier buttons of the 360 controller compared to Playstation’s.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good game that didn’t fully click with me. While it’s true I’ve never been super interested in Batman in the past, I have recently started to appreciate the nuance and quirks that make him an interesting character. So I don’t think it is this disinterest in the source material that leads me to feel indifferent to Arkham Asylum. It’s more of a few smaller issues I have with the game that built themselves into mixed experience: the lack of any real investigation for the world’s great detective, combat feeling over-simple while at the same time very strict, stiff controls like Batman used too much starch while cleaning his Batsuit, and the tedious boss fights. I can see why people love this game and can see the seed of something truly great in it. Maybe not surprising then, the sequel. Batman: Arkham City, is possibly even more highly lauded then it’s predecessor. So keep you Batradar tuned for that in future.

Portal & Portal 2: Critical Miss #24

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I’m GLaDOS I Played These

Friends of mine are surprised to learn I never played Portal or Portal 2. The classic games developed and published by Valve were released in 2007 and 2011, respectively. While I had a passing interest in games in 2007, playing Super Mario 64 on my DS and Mario Kart on my Wii, I wasn’t at all up to date on any games releasing. And by 2011, I was in college, playing pretty much no games besides a Pokémon run here and there. The Portal series has just passed me by until now. Even after I learned of the series and its reputation, I never had a computer powerful enough to run it. So when I got my used Xbox 360, I downloaded the games and played through them to fill in the interdimensional hole in my gaming knowledge.

The story of Portal focuses on a woman named Chel who is being forced to run through science tests by GLaDOS, a robot controlling the functions of Aperture Science. It’s a simple story—a story of human vs machine, athleticism vs intelligence, silence vs wit. Even though the player controls Chel, GLaDOS steals the entire show. Impeccably acted by Ellen McLain, she provides the dry, straight-faced, and incredibly sharp humor that the game is praised for, but still manages to be threatening as a unfeeling machine. Early in the game, Chel will be giving a Portal Gun, a machine that creates openings on certain walls that can be used to instantly pass through the space between them.

The portals are an incredible mechanic—technically impressive, amazingly fun, and delightfully disorienting. I never really got used to the camera swinging around as gravity took effect on the character leaving a portal, but those moments are so short that you will quickly adjust. Since momentum is kept while entering and leaving portals, a lot of puzzles rely on that to spring yourself across larger gaps or to higher platforms not reachable through normal means. Other puzzles require holding down buttons with weighted cubes, creating a path for an electrical sphere to meet with a conductor to activate a button, and taking out turrets by knocking them over, either by grabbing them from behind or dropping things on them. 

Some puzzles will test your aiming speed and reflexes by giving you just a few seconds after exiting a portal to shoot another one on to be transported to. These were my least favorite in the game. I had gotten so settled into a comfy state of examining the level design and finding ways to access what I needed through portal placement, that the emphasis on speed and reflexes in the later part of the game didn’t feel like I was being tested on what had been taught to me.

The level design in general is rather rigid due to the fact that portals can only be created on certain surfaces. This is not a bad thing, however, since it helps keep puzzles and the rules of the game consistent and focused. In the last part of the game, you escape the steril test chambers and explore the rusted, grimy maintenance halls of the facility. The puzzles are still as straightforward as before, but the change in scenery goes a long way to freshen up the feel of the games. 

Honestly, Portal is pretty much perfect. The only complaint I have is with minor hit detections issues. I played the Xbox 360 Stay Alive version so I’m not sure if this was an issue with the original PC release, but the rounded edges of the portals seem to catch on the character and cubes while going through portals. This would lead to missed jumps as my momentum was halted or dropped items missing their target as a corner clipped the edge of a portal and physics sent it spinning off course. It’s not a major complaint at all and hardly dampened my opinion of the game, but it was something I kept noticing.

The only other thing I sometimes hear criticized about the game is its short length. The game is about 2-3 hours long, I completed my first playthrough in just an evening, but I think the length is to the game’s benefit. There is no wasted space in Portal, every inch of the game world has a purpose and it comes in, shows off the ideas it has, and ends before it becomes stale or boring. It is such a tightly, perfectly designed game that I couldn’t image it being any longer. That was, however, until I played Portal 2, which is a perfect example of the phrase “bigger isn’t always better.”

Portal 2 is pretty much the same game as the original, but with just more stuff added. Bigger environments, more puzzles, more characters and story—it’s a classic follow up philosophy where the sequel has to be bigger and bolder (the Alien/Aliens effect). While the portal gameplay is still as fun as ever, there were so many more elements added to the puzzles. Instead of just portals with the occasional electric ball or cube to worry about, Portal 2’s puzzles will have you redirecting lasers, creating light bridges, and using three different kinds of gels, each with a unique property, to solve puzzles. All these new mechanics are explained and utilized well enough and pretty fun to use, but their inclusion seemed to necessitate larger rooms and environments for the puzzles to take place in, hurting the tightness and ultrafocus of the original game’s design. Gameplay is not the only thing that has been expanded upon either. The story is chattier than ever in Portal 2.

GLaDOS now has to share the spotlight with robot core named Wheatley, played by Stephen Merchant, and the prerecorded messages of Cave Johnson, played by J. K. Simmons. I found Wheatley pretty annoying, but he is not unfunny, and Simmons as Cave Johnson is just a delight because he seems to be tapping into his J. Jonah Jameson character from the Rami Spider-Man films. There are some very funny bits with Johnson ranting about mantis man and exploding lemons, but the humor of the game expands from the specific dry wit of the first game and becomes sillier and more general. I would say that Portal 2 is funnier than the first, but I’m a sucker for the straight-facedness of the first game’s comedy.

The point of max frustration toward Portal 2 for me came at the end. You have a great bit of (literal) raising action as you climb your way out of the ruined, old facility and you are flushed with victory, ready for the faceoff with Wheatley and the climax of the story. But then the pacing grinds to halt as Wheatley makes you perform more tests to keep his high going. It’s a funny bit at first, but it could have worked with just requiring the player to complete a few more tests. Instead you have to go through about a dozen more. I was ready for the game to end, but it insisted on sticking around for another hour or so after its logical end point. And this is ultimately what Portal has over its sequel. Portal knew exactly when to end before it got stale or ran out of ideas, and Portal 2 went on past the point where it had anything new to share.
Portal and Portal 2 are still some of the most beloved and respected puzzle games to this day and that’s because they are both great, but I find the original far superior to its sequel. The best way I can explain my opinions of the games is to imagine them as a boxer. Portal is the boxer at the prime of their career: in fighting trim with absolute zero fat on them. Portal 2 is the same boxer forty years later, after retirement: a little fatter than they were, but still strong and in better shape than most people. Either way, either game can still beat the crap out of the majority of AAA games releasing nowadays.

Bioshock & Plasmids

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Bioshock could have easily been just another 1st person shooter, one destined to fade out of memory soon after its release. But nearly 15 years after appearing on store shelves, it’s still a highly regarded and discussed game to this day. It sets itself apart from other shooters of its time, and still those of today, in many ways: the setting and atmosphere of the underwater city of Rapture, its commentary on freewill and the politics of Objectivism, its strong writing and memorable twist. However, I think the major thing that made Bioshock stand out are the Plasmids, how they affect gameplay and the story, and most importantly how it ties the two together.

In the context of gameplay, Plasmids are upgrades. They range from offensive abilities like starting fires, freezing enemies, and summoning swarms of bees, to passive buffs like increased defense, attack, and improved hacking skills. They are found throughout Rapture, encouraging exploration, and bought using ADAM, the material taken from the Little Sisters. ADAM is also used to purchase more slots that additional Plasmids can be equipped too. This system gives the game RPG elements without relying on skill trees or upgrade points that would infest similar games in the 2010s. This allows players to create their own playstyle and RPG-like builds that best emphasizes that style.

As with most 1st person shooters, firing weapons is mapped to the right trigger. However, instead of the left trigger being used to look down sights, it is mapped to using Plasmids in Bioshock as that is the hand the character uses them from. This is very intuitive and oddly immersive as you watch the character mimic the same movements you make. It draws you into the game and helps you step into the shoes of the protagonist. Having the left trigger control Plasmids does mean that typical down-sight aiming controls had to be moved and are instead mapped to pressing in the right trigger. While this is clumsy to use, it’s not a big issue since the tight halls and enclosed spaces of Rapture ensure that precise aiming is not really needed. I found myself perfectly capable of fighting off enemies with just the regular aiming icon and found the iron sights to be more difficult to use in a heated fight. While it at first feels like a weird omission, the game is built around not needing iron sights and is worth the exclusion for the fun of easily using Plasmids with the left hand.

In combat, Plasmids have many uses. There are the typical damage causing skills like Incinerate and Insect Swarm, but there are also ones with more indirect uses like Enrage, which makes enemies attack each other, and Security Bullseye, which causes enemies to trigger security cameras and turrets. Some even have secondary effects. Winter Blast freezes enemies making them easier to kill at the cost of loot, Incinerate can melt ice to open doors or reveal items, and Electro Bolt can electrify water to hit multiple enemies at once. It’s a little disappointing that not all Plasmids have these secondary uses, especially with Winter Blast as there are tons of puddles on the ground or streams of water falling from the ceiling. It seems like a missed opportunity to be able to freeze the puddles to trip enemies or the streams to create a shield.

While there are not many drastically different ways to build a character, there are many options and combinations of Plasmids for the players to choose. Some players may see the value of Plasmids I did not. Maybe they want to equip all the modifiers for the wrench and try a more melee focus build. The Plasmids instill a sense of creativity in the player not offered by many other 1st person shooters. And with health and EVE, the material needed to use Plasmids, needing to be kept track of, there is an additional layer of complexity. You can choose to go for an easy freeze kill if you are low on health and medkits, or you may rely solely on your weapons if EVE is precious and Plasmids not available. A have and have-not system that would be all too familiar to the city of Rapture.

Bioshock critiques Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism by showing the inherent greed, selfishness, and unsustainability present in it and the Plasmids not only represent the downfall of Rapture, but a direct cause of it too. Since Plasmids were such an addictive substance, it was highly sought after in the city. The citizens started taking more and more of it until they mutated in the Splicers you fight throughout the game. Through audio logs, you learn that the founder, Andrew Ryan, refused to regulate the creation and use of Plasmids, instead trusting the free market to sort itself out. He even encourages other businesses to offer a better product if they wish to compete with them. 

These revelations add a lot of context to the things the player sees throughout the game. Obviously Rapture is nearly completely dismantled when you arrive, but figuring out how it got that way is up to you to discover. It makes the Splicers sympathetic but past the point of reasoning with, it makes the leaders standing by their zealot beliefs almost cartoonish when they are faced with the tragic outcomes they’ve created. The whole game paints Ryan and the other notably people of Rapture as highly intelligent, creatively ambitious, and extremely driven, but also incapable to accept the consequences of their choices, responsibility for the seeds they have sowed. 

This is the type of storytelling that games thrive in over other forms of media like books or movies. With the interactivity games offer, there is more engagement that comes from the strong context and connection the player can feel when gameplay and story are woven together. Players feel more involved in the story, even in linear games like Bioshock, when the story informs the gameplay, it feels like you are part of the world of the game, it helps with immersion while playing and satisfaction when they succeed.

The Plasmids help with all this. They are simply fun to use, but also help players feel more freedom in their playstyles in a genre that typically doesn’t offer much differences between playthroughs. They are a great example of story informing gameplay, making the entire game feel more cohesive as a whole, not like gameplay or story was the main focus with the other being an afterthought. They are the main reason why Bioshock is still so much fun today while other 1st person shooters of the era have aged poorly or drifted out of memory completely. It’s a great example of how much a little creative, intuitive gameplay design well tied into a story expands the experience of a game

Spec Ops: The Line – Critical Miss #19

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Image by SilenceInTheLibrary at specops.fandom.com/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line

Lines Drawn in the Sand

I stated in my Vanquish review that I missed the years in the late 2000’s where cover based shooters were the hot new thing. Even today, it’s not a genre I gravitate into, along with the trend of modern day military shooters like the CoD games since Modern Warfare. They tend to be too slow and dry for me. So why is it then that when I purchased a Xbox 360, one of the first games I bought for the system was Spec Ops: The Line, a modern military cover based shooter? Extremely positive word of mouth is one thing, but the real reason I had to play it was because the game is lauded as one of the most interesting uses of narrative in video games. 

Set in Dubai during cataclysmic sandstorms, you play as Captain Walker, a US Delta Force operator and his two man crew of Lugo and Adams. They have come to the ruined city in response to a radio transmission from Colonel Konrad, a man Walker fought under in the past. Their mission is simple: locate survivors from the sandstorms and radio for evac. This gets immediately complicated as Walker’s team finds themselves under attack by two sides of battling for control of the city. Refugees attack the team thinking they are part of Konrad’s 33rd battalion, and the 33rd themselves mistake Walker’s team as CIA agents who have been supplying the refugees with arms to fight the 33rd.

Image by SilenceInTheLibrary at specops.fandom.com/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line

The setting of Dubai half buried in desert sand is one of my favorite things about the game. It effortlessly juxtaposes the opulent wealth of the glass shard skyscrapers and the clutter, squalor poverty of the holes where the refugees are hiding. The levels will take you throughout the sand filled streets, dark and buried-in ground floors, high up in gaudy condos, and zip-lining across rooftops. While the setting is great, art direction if often lacking, especially in terms of character design. There were times I laughed during a shoot out because I would see multiple of the same character model rushing through a doorway. This lack of strong character design tended to confuse the story for me too. Most of the major players in the plot, the characters with speaking lines and move the story forward, are the boilerplate white dude military type and I had the hardest time remembering who was who.

It’s a good thing that the setting was interesting because I found the gameplay to be only fine at best. The actual shooting mechanics are engaging in a fight, but everything around it—getting in and out of cover, sprinting across battlefields, waiting for enemies to pop out of cover to be shot like cans on wall—felt slow and tedious. This is no doubt influenced by my lack of enjoyment from cover based shooters in general and I will say that I didn’t find Spec Ops to be any more clunky than other games in the genre I’ve played. The game does have a few unique mechanics to it. Walker’s teammates, Lugo and Adams, can help snipe or grenade enemies at the player’s command. Sand can be used throughout the game by blowing out windows to bury enemies, grenades causing clouds of dust that the player can use for cover, and even occasional sand storms will blind both player and enemies, sending both in a mad dash for safety indoors. Sadly, these mechanics are never explored to their fullest potential and it is almost always faster to just kill enemies you have your sights on instead of fiddling with calling out to a NPC to shoot them. They very well be much more crucial tools on the harder difficulties, but on normal like I played, they seem no more back of the box selling points. But I didn’t expect the gameplay  to blow me away when I purchased Spec Ops. What I was there to see was the story.

Image by SilenceInTheLibrary at specops.fandom.com/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line

I beg anyone who hasn’t played Spec Ops: The Line to stop reading this review now. Go play the game if you have the means to or watch an unnarrated playthrough on YouTube. This is a game that needs to experienced without expectations and an open heart. I will not be spoiling everything in the story, but must discuss the turning point from a box standard military shooter to a repeated kick in the gut.

The game works as a deconstruction of other military shooters like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor that were on the rage during that time. It starts with the unflappable heroes, dripping with unwavering duty and machismo, as they saunter into Dubai, cocksure and cracking jokes. When they find themselves being attacked by refugees and the 33rd, Walker decides the best thing to do would be to locate Konrad. In the pursuit, they must pass through a heavily guarded section of the city and Walker decides to clear out the opposing forces using white phosphorus. This is where the shoe drops. Walker and his crew soon find that the 33rd had set up a camp for refugees there too and they had just wiped out 47 civilian lives.

Image by SilenceInTheLibrary at specops.fandom.com/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line

From there the chaos continues to spiral. Konrad commands Walker to choose between killing a water thief and soldier who murdered civilians, the team helps a CIA agent named Higgs raid and steal the water the 33rd was guarding only to crash the trunks and destroy it, and Walker opens fire on a group of civilians after they hang Lugo. The game actively forces the player to commit more atrocious acts of violence because this is a war and, like Walker says, there’s not always a choice, But Spec Ops does not celebrate these actions. Quickly the veneer of glory in the line of duty and ends justifying the means mentality is ripped away and there is only death caused by the characters, and the player.

Walker himself becomes noticeably more angry and violent after using the white phosphorus scene. His simple shouts of “Got one!” when you shoot an enemy during gameplay turns to “Got the motherfucker!” and “Fuck you!” as he ends countless lives. I will not spoil the ending because I had not had it spoiled for me before playing but it is a great capstone to everything the story and themes have been working towards. It completely recontextualized the 2nd half of the story and Walker’s complete psyche.

One of the most interesting aspects of the narrative is that it simply doesn’t make a lot of sense. I was having a little difficulty following it for a bit because it didn’t seem logically tied together, the events of a scene didn’t always understandably lead to decisions Walker makes on what to do next. But I think that’s the point. The whole story is built on assumptions and bad faith on Walker’s part. What made me realize this was the death of CIA agent Gould. It is discovered that he was planning on storming an area of Dubai named The Gate and Walker decides that’s where his team must head to next. When asked what’s important about The Gate, Walker just says “Gould thought it was important enough to die for, so it must be important.” This leads directly to the use of the white phosphorus to clean out the soldiers guarding The Gate. When agent Higgs ropes the Delta Force team into helping him steal water from the 33rd, Walker just goes along with it. He clearly does not trust Higgs, but he agrees to be a part of the plan with much second thought. 

Image by SilenceInTheLibrary at specops.fandom.com/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line

There are no good guys in Spec Ops: The Line, but I’m not sure I would say there are any bad guys either. There are just people doing what they think they have to do no matter the cost. Walker has to find meaning to the madness happening in the city, Konrad was trying to protect the refugees even if it meant by force, Higgs felt the need to cover up Konrad’s crime out of fear of the world discovering them. There is no good or evil; there are only people fighting to stay alive, people insisting they are in the right, the messy gray morals of war and people fighting to the death. 

Art is not always pleasant. It’s not always comfortable. Look at the pain and grief portrayed in Picasso’s Guernica or the stomach turning scenes of assault in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Some art is designed to shine a light on the darkest parts of the human heart and challenge the viewer themselves with questions they may not want to answer. Spec Ops: The Line is one such piece of art. Throughout the game, it constantly asks: What are you doing? Is this right? Do you feel like a hero yet? But they just hang there. It does not offer any answers because it is not up to the game to decide. The only one who can answer those questions are yourself.

Vanquish – Critical Miss #17

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Voom, Voom, Shoot, Shoot

I missed out on the scourge of cover based shooters in the 2010’s. My only real experience with the genre was a little bit of Gears of War with an ex in college, which I found pretty dull, and half of the first Uncharted game that came free with my PS4, which was fine but the combat seemed to rely too much on memorizing enemy spawns. To be honest, none of the games ever looked that interesting to me. That was until I saw Vanquish. Released in 2010, the game was directed by Shinji Mikami and developed by Platinum Games, a combination that seems made to appeal to myself specifically. The thing that truly caught my eye when I first saw it was the gameplay: the speed, movement, and hyperactive nature no cover based shooter has shown before or since.

The reason for this fast paced gameplay is because the main character, Sam, is equipped with a DARPA design power suit that lets him slide around with rocket jets. This allows the player to skid across the combat arena at obscene speeds to change cover and maneuver around enemies. The suit also allows Sam to activate a bullet time mechanic. This happens either by aiming down a gun’s sights while dodging or when critically low on health, which is useful because, like most things in the game, damage racks up fast and death comes quickly if not played carefully. 

The rocket boots and slo mo mechanic leads to one of the two things that Vanquish is built around: speed and movement. Speed is an obvious key aspect to a game with rocket boots as a main mechanic. However, the importance of speed is also emphasized in Vanquish because most enemies stay at the same speed. Very few enemies move particularly quick, prefer to sit behind cover and hardly ever rush you down, and because of this Sam’s speed gives him a direct advantage. The high speed of the rocket slide gives him the ability to change positions faster than the enemies can react and the low speed of the bullet time let’s him hold enemies in place to load bullets in them.

Movement is the other major aspect that the game excels in, but it’s not just Sam’s own movement abilities where this is shown. The best levels in the game are where parts of the level themselves are moving. There’s a level where the enemies are on conveyor belts slowing going down the middle of the room; another where Sam and the marines travelling by a freight transporter on rails and the enemies are attacking from another transport as the rails move them up above and to either side of the player. This allows the enemies to reposition without having to leave cover, making them harder to hit and much more interesting to fight.

I haven’t talked much about the story of Vanquish yet and that’s because there really isn’t much to say. The game starts with Russia invading a US space station and using a giant microwave beam to wreak havoc on San Francisco. Sam is sent into the station along with some marines launching an attack to stop them. Both Sam and the leader of the marines, Burns, have Shinji Mikami’s trademark over the top machismo to them, but it’s played too straight to be as deliciously ridiculous as Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4. Overall, I was left underwhelmed by the story. I was expecting absurd set pieces and tongue in cheek irony from Mikami and Platinum Games, but only found a bare bones story with little to keep me engaged.

This is why I started to resent the game slightly anytime it slowed to crawl to dumb exposition. The cut scenes were fun enough to watch, but it seemed like every new mission started with Sam walking through an empty room at a glacial pace while talking to his mission control Metal Gear Solid style. I was having fun with the gameplay and these moments makes the game feel extremely stilted. 

The stilted feeling bleeds into gameplay too because the game starts to feel repetitive by the end. With a lack of enemy designs and repeating bosses, the combat moments blur together, giving a feeling of déjà vu as you wonder ‘Haven’t I done this before?’ What would have helped was using more of a variety of weapons, but I didn’t see a use for the more unique weapons like the disc launcher, LFE gun, or laser cannon. This might be because I never bothered to use them enough to upgrade them, but I was having fun enough with just an assault rifle, boosted machine gun, and sniper rifle, occasionally a rocket launcher for a tough enemy. 

This isn’t to say Vanquish is not fun because it definitely is. Boosting around the battlefield with rocket boots, shooting up enemies and slowing time for better shots is a blast. A lackluster story and some pacing issues are not enough to take away from the solid core gameplay loop in the center of the game. The game is short, but it is the perfect length for a game of its type, spending just enough time to explore its unique mechanics and ending before the repetition got too tedious. Vanquish gets a recommendation from me, especially if you can find a cheap copy, which should be hard due to the game not selling well at release and falling into cult favorite stardom. Which is pretty perfect for a game as unique and fun, but also flawed as Vanquish.