Vanquish

This is an all timer for me and my go-to game when I feel like playing a 3rd person shooter. A game that I find tends to be misunderstood due to the expectations of the developer that made it's future and previous games. So lets start out with what this game isn't: it isn't a stylish movement shooter, it doesn't have an insane narrative, and the game isn't particularly beautiful visually even if I love the character designs. In those regards it does stick out from platinum's pantheon of early 2010s classics. What it is, in fact, is a cover shooter with regenerating health. Otherwise known as one of the most overdone genres the console generation this came out in. However it's also a reminder that genre saturation means nothing in the face of quality. This is a game that's all about learning the unique mechanics to survive and efficiently take out enemies, and it will force you to learn. It's extremely punishing in terms of moment to moment gameplay, especially on the harder difficulties where you fold like tissue paper and your tools for doing the cool stuff (slow mo and boosting) are super limited. In fact doing a single melee attack puts you into overheat which locks all that out for a longer period of time. Though it's that tug of war with the boost meter that's one of the core things that I find makes this game so good. Learning to squeeze the absolute most out of your movement by dashing between cover or repositioning from a bad spot or to be more aggressive with close range weapons. Assuming THE GUN STANCE in slow mo to pop a group of snipers or dish out the pain to a boss weak spot. All of this carries the risk of being overzealous and overheating or taking one too many hits triggering a mandatory slow mo which drains the rest of your meter automatically. The game's length while somewhat maligned is honestly one of the biggest boons in my opinion, running around 5-6 hours on a first playthrough with it getting the absolute most out of its roster of enemies and weapons with little redundancy in encounters. Even when bosses are repeated, the whole fight itself in arena design and the enemies they're paired with is unique enough to stand out enough to not feel like copy pasting assets. In short, This is a game that seems intent for the most part to not waste your time. No shoehorned in RPG mechanics, no grind for meta-progression, no unlocking moves, just non-stop carefully designed action. Barring one awfully pace breaking slow ass auto-scroll segments (which mercifully lasts only 5 minutes) the game is constantly throwing you into encounter after encounter. This is to the point where they banish the tutorial to its own menu option and the game's first few encounters are big open arenas with tons of enemies to shoot starting off each playthrough with a bang. What makes me love this game so much though, is how both the pacing and unique loop of combat come together to be a character action game that you have to earn. Where gameplay looks incredible while having a purpose for each of the insane maneuvers you're pulling off, not just to look nice for a score meter. It's one of those truly special games that expands as you get better instead of compressing as weapons, moves, and tactics that seemed asinine and useless click into place and end up being what brings you the win in the hardest challenges. That's why I'm writing this review after so many years. My first god hard playthrough ended with me eating ♥♥♥♥ on the final until I switched gears to going all in on insanely risky tactics which I'd always seen in passing but never thought much of due to looking like a whole lotta showing off. Turns out all that crazy fun high execution anime ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was what shot me forth to my first win which was an experience I rarely find in action games. After years of playing this game it feels like it only now has truly opened up to me.