But no I have actually played the game and I actually beat it today. If you read my post in the Underrated 2010 thread you would see what I actually think. And no I don't think Vanquish is serious at all.
It's a pretty terrible game ,but its lol worthy in how Temco thought this was what American gamers wanted. Funny and almost insulting. The lead character beyond having a line ripped off of Marcus Fenix, spouts nothing but how much he wants to kill everything. Is this how we Americans like are characters? Maybe, but it's too much here. The character will say stuff like "Come here and let me kill you like i killed all your friends", "last one left weak", "now the fun begins, I'm going to kill you", and "mmm ammo". It's kind of funny that we are supposed to like the character. The game does put in effort to flesh out his backstory. We see it, but it's only half finished as a obvious connection is never made and we never go back to it. The story does have an intriguing mystery, in the way Cavia games do. But like Cavia games it's mishandled and kind of dumped on you at the end. Not as bad as in Qt though, were at the end everything is dumped on you. Maybe I'm talking too much about the story, but there is quite a lot of it. The collectible side stuff is for example all about the story.
As for the gameplay. Well it is kind of like drunk Gears of War. The aiming never feels responsive and the enemies run around and it's hard to keep a feed on them. Doesn't matter though because the Ai is pretty stupid. Typical bad ai here. They either run at you or just jump from cover to cover with no thought. The challenge only comes from the their numbers and the unresponsive aiming. When a lot is going on, it can be annoying and taking cover isn't the end all solution as some enemies can still shoot you.
As for your female partner, many times have I seen her just shoot at the wall. Sometimes she takes down things and is useful, but mostly just as a bullet sponge. The game isn't hard, even the bigger enemies take a few shots. There's no skill or style here. Just shoot, run, evade, and take cover.Nothing special. Even throwing your bitch is'nt needed and I never did a melee combo in the actual game. One of the few cool thing in the game wasn't needed at all.
As for the technical aspects. I guess the image quality is good. No slowdown, visuals are technically fine and clear. FMV shows no signs of compression. Still animation is a bit strange. When you fall it looks silly, among other things.
I guess one of the cool things about the game was that environments change. Forget about that. There are maybe 1 or 2 times when that happens and the battlefield actually becomes different, but for the most part it's on rails so to speak and doesn't really alter your battle. It also adds stupid jump to platfourm shit, that is very awkward because you simply don't have a feel for your character and it isn't responsive.
So technically the game works and it wont give you any problems. I myself enjoy playing bad quirky Japanese games and we don't have a lot of those this gen. So I enjoyed it in that sense. It works and is in no way broken, it's just really bad. But funny that Temco thought this is what would lead them to success in the west.
