Vanquish opens with San Francisco burning. A microwave energy array, built to power a space colony, has been turned into a weapon and aimed at the city. Within minutes, Sam Gideon is sliding across a space station floor on his knees, firing a rifle that reshapes itself into whatever gun the battlefield offers. That is the whole pitch, and it still lands.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Sam Gideon and the Augmented Reaction Suit
PlatinumGames built Vanquish around one idea: a third-person shooter that moves like a 2D bullet hell game. Sam wears the Augmented Reaction Suit, a prototype battlesuit with jet boosters on his thighs. Boosters let him slide across an area at speed. AR mode slows the world down and lets him pick off enemies and their weak spots. Use either too much and the suit overheats, leaving him slow and grounded until it cools.
That heat gauge is the design. It turns every fight into a decision about when to burn and when to hold back. The suit also drops into AR mode automatically when Sam takes heavy damage, which reads as a mercy until you notice it is also a warning.
His weapon, the BLADE system, scans existing guns and transforms into them. It holds three scans at a time and switches between them on command. The result is a shooter where the arsenal is a menu you build yourself, mid-fight, out of whatever the enemy brought.
Robert Burns, Victor Zaitsev and the Order of the Russian Star
The plot is pure pulp, delivered straight. Earth’s population passed 10 billion. Wars over food and energy followed. America answered with the SC-01 Providence colony, an O’Neil Cylinder that beams solar power home by microwave.
Then a faction of the Russian military, the Order of the Russian Star, takes power in a coup and seizes Providence. Agent Victor Zaitsev turns the transmitter on San Francisco and demands unconditional surrender within 10 hours or New York is next. President Elizabeth Winters refuses and orders a strike led by Lt. Col. Robert Burns, with Sam and Bravo Company along for the ride. DARPA wants its suit tested. Winters also wants scientist Dr. Francois Candide rescued.
The cast is fully voiced in English and Japanese. Gideon Emery plays Sam. Steve Blum plays Burns. Kari Wahlgren plays Elena Ivanova, the voice in Sam’s ear from the SBC2 command ship. Lee Meriwether plays the President. Marc Worden plays Zaitsev.
What Vanquish Gets Right, and What It Does Not
The combat is the reason to be here. Sliding into a group of transforming battle robots, popping AR mode, and shooting out a weak spot before the suit overheats is a loop no other shooter of its era matched. The boss fights hold up. The visual style holds up. The game introduced the sliding-boost mechanic and a bullet-hell pace to a genre that mostly stood still behind cover.
The writing does not hold up. The story is thin, the voice acting is uneven, and the campaign runs short. Those are real costs, not nitpicks. Vanquish asks you to care about a war over resources and a kidnapped scientist, then gives that material almost no room to breathe.
The port history is worth knowing. Vanquish shipped in October 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 after starting development in 2007. A Windows port arrived on May 25, 2017. The Bayonetta & Vanquish 10th Anniversary Bundle, with remastered versions of both games, came to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on February 18, 2020. It has sold an estimated 1 million units worldwide.
The Verdict on Vanquish
Sixteen years on, Vanquish is still the cleanest argument that a shooter can be about movement rather than cover. The suit’s heat gauge forces constant, small decisions, and the BLADE system keeps the weapon wheel in your hands instead of the level designer’s. That is a design achievement the short campaign cannot erase.
It is also a game that never solves its own storytelling problem. The geopolitical setup is more interesting than anything the script does with it, and the ending arrives before the cast earns it. Play it for the sliding, the AR mode and the robots. Skip it if you need a reason to care why any of it is happening.
KEY FACTS
– Score: 8.1/10
– Released: October 2010
– Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360; PC (Windows) May 25, 2017; PS4 and Xbox One via the Bayonetta & Vanquish 10th Anniversary Bundle, February 18, 2020
– Developer: PlatinumGames
– Publisher: Sega
– Estimated sales: over 1 million units worldwide
– Critic aggregate: 8.1/10 across 9 outlets
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