The year is 2010, a fairly substantial year for gaming, really. While nothing may match the absolute dizzying highs of something like 2001 or 2015, whose unbelievably stacked release schedules were nothing short of mythical, plenty of prominent releases came and went alongside a handful of duds:
- Alan Wake, Deadly Premonition, Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, and other prominent narrative-driven titles debuted to varying levels of success, either becoming cult favorites or full-blown hits for their respective publishers.
- Sequels were aplenty, with new entries in the Metal Gear Solid, Halo, Mass Effect, Dead Rising, BioShock, and Silent Hill franchises being just a handful of the year’s biggest titles.
- Brand-new properties, interestingly, were found around every corner. But that’s not to say that they were always good. Darksiders, Splatterhouse, Dante’s Inferno, Metro 2033, Resonance of Fate, Nier, ModNation Racers, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent either dazzled or floundered in their respective markets, all while sowing the seeds of the indie scene that would later flourish in the late 2010s.
One game in particular really stands out, however. Two, actually. PlatinumGames, a studio mostly forged from the remnants of Capcom’s Clover Studio in 2007, would find themselves continuing their publishing partnership with SEGA on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This was after the underwhelming commercial performance of MadWorld, their debut game on the Wii.
One of these is Bayonetta, the slick, Hideki Kamiya-directed brawler whose fashionable lead was just as popular as its over-the-top action and arcade sensibilities. While it originally debuted in Japan in 2009, it didn’t cross over into the United States until January 2010, with PlatinumGames’ next title debuting globally in October of that year. To date, that particular game marks PlatinumGames’ first and only foray into the world of third-person shooters.
Fifteen years after it originally released, let’s take a look back at Vanquish, one of the most recent games directed by the legendary Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, God Hand, The Evil Within), and what exactly it brought to the table against a glut of similar games that permeated the late 2000s through the early 2010s.
Which Was the Style At the Time

It’s the distant future. Overpopulation, energy concerns, constant war, it’s the all-too-familiar kind of dystopia that justifies bombastic action. The United States has engineered a solution to some of these troubles, at least. Enter the SC-01 Providence, a cylindrical space colony whose massive solar arrays can provide a viable power source to stem societal bleeding. The Russians, however, think differently.
After a successful coup headlined by the Order of the Russian Star leads to a direct takeover of the Providence, it’s subsequently turned into a weapon of mass destruction, leading to the city of San Francisco being cooked into a pile of burnt rubble. New York City is the next target, according to Russian Star agent Victor Zaitsev, unless the American government immediately surrenders unconditionally.
RELATED: ‘Mutation’ Game Preview: An Indie Gem in the Rough
Naturally, the United States doesn’t let that fly. An army of space marines led by Robert Burns is swiftly sent into the reaches of space to commandeer the Providence before New York City is leveled. Sent alongside them, however, is the true hero of the story.
Sam Gideon: a skilled DARPA operative and habitual chain smoker who comes equipped with a prototype Augmented Reaction Suit (ARS) that grants him superhuman abilities. Jet boosters, durable armor plating, heightened senses, and a built-in heads-up display are joined by the BLADE weapon system, an experimental tool that shifts and changes into whatever weapon is needed for the current situation. With his handler Elena safely guiding him along the way, Sam joins Burns in an effort to retake the Providence, assassinate Zaitsev, and covertly rescue a missing scientist who holds the key to preventing another disaster.
The story isn’t all that original, all things considered. But it’s certainly entertaining. A PlatinumGames blog post authored by “JP” detailed the work that went into Vanquish‘s narrative design, not only explaining certain decisions made in conceptualizing its antagonists and wider themes but also describing why there’s a degree of silly self-awareness to be found throughout:
“In essence, Vanquish is tinged with parody, but not [to] the point of being overt. I read a review that said, ‘It’s hard to tell whether it is taking the piss or not, which in itself may well be the intention.’ Many of the dialogue lines in Vanquish are way over-the-top, but then again, you are talking about a group of super-powered space marines attacking a colony the size of a small city in space. I think it would be incredibly strange if they played things overly straight faced, so why not have fun with things? Why not make the characters aware of not only the ridiculousness of the situation, but also the varied cultural influences that lead to the creation of a game like Vanquish? My intent, at least with the English script, was not fan service, but rather making sure the game never forgets what it is — a game.”
This is most evident in the hilariously hokey relationship shared between Sam and Burns. The very first time the two interact in isolation, a heated exchange over Sam’s inexperience and his proclivity for nicotine leads to a brief fight between the two, starting and ending just as Burns slashes Sam’s lit cigarette in half.
Sam, bewildered, exclaims: “What the f***, man?”
Burns, coldly, explains: “You’re not allowed to smoke on the ship.”
It’s the kind of self-awareness you’d find in ample amounts in Bayonetta, arguably PlatinumGames’ most identifiable game next to Nier: Automata. The title character is as confident and self-assured as Sam (albeit in a much more extravagant and sexually-charged way), and the two share a similar level of comedic sensibilities in their respective games. Sam’s gruff and gritty vocal performance by Gideon Emery only adds to the entertaining schlock as well, especially when you compare it to his grounded performances in games like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Wolfenstein: The New Order.
RELATED: ‘The Thing: Remastered’ Game Review: The (Mostly) Definitive Way to Play
Interestingly, Sam and Bayonetta both also have a specific tool that makes their respective games much easier to play. Bayonetta utilized “Witch Time,” the ability to slow down time and deal massive damage to enemies by simply dodging an attack at the perfect moment. While it certainly felt like an integral piece of the game, made more evident by later games in the series doubling down on the mechanic, it’s not technically necessary in order to win. The hardest difficulty in Bayonetta, Non-Stop Infinite Climax, actively disables Witch Time for all but a handful of moments, leaving you only with your accrued skills and game knowledge to progress. Vanquish has something fairly similar.
Using Cover Isn’t the Goal Here

Vanquish, at least to my knowledge, is the only third-person cover shooter that actively tracks the amount of time you’ve spent in cover at the end of every mission—even going so far as to tally up the total percentage of your time in cover when the game is over. Beyond just bragging rights, it’s a way to roughly measure how well you’re performing in terms of engaging with the game’s mechanics.
In many other third-person cover shooters, there’s a basic way to approach just about any scenario: approach a chest-high wall, drop down below it, and unleash a hail of lead against whatever might be on the other side. There are wrenches thrown into this formula occasionally, yes, but this is the core idea. The subgenre has its origins in games like 2003’s Kill Switch and even 1999’s WinBack, if you want to look back far enough. But its popularity would explode with the debut of Gears of War in 2006. From there, the formula was practically set in stone.
RELATED: ‘Slitterhead’ Game Review: A Strong Debut for Keiichiro Toyama’s New Studio
You really can’t overexaggerate just how much Gears‘ DNA permeated a lot of action games that came out during the seventh generation of consoles, even up until the beginning of the eighth generation. Army of Two, the later Mass Effect games, Uncharted, and even Japanese efforts like Binary Domain and Quantum Theory put their own mild spin on the groundwork established by Gears to varying degrees of success. Some games even opted to take a subversive approach to their aping of Gears, with Spec Ops: The Line, particularly, using its comparatively bland gameplay as a vessel for a wider critique of military-themed games and violence in the virtual space.
While Vanquish doesn’t critique its players for diving headfirst into wanton destruction, it does provide its own interesting spin on the “cover” in cover shooting. In other games, finding cover and affixing yourself to it is the end-all-be-all. Leaving the precious comfort of a chest-high wall means that you’re exposed, and should a game be particularly difficult; you’ll be shot dead in no time. In Vanquish, the tools you have at your disposal are efficient enough to make cover play a smaller role in everything that’s going on.
In another PlatniumGames blog post, animator Takaaki Yamaguchi discussed the overall “feel” of the game. Though he primarily talked about his work on the game’s numerous animations and how they convey the kind of fast-paced atmosphere Vanquish‘s direction entailed, a particular snippet really captures the general sentiment behind Vanquish‘s approach to cover:
“We started by knowing [and] rejecting what had become the calm, expected elements of shooters:
‘Remember the map, find a good spot, hide, then move.’
‘If you get discovered, move to another hiding spot.’
‘Fire before you are fired upon.’
Instead, we went with something only aggressive words could describe:
‘No running away! Move forward!’
‘I don’t want people crawling along or hiding under cover!’
‘You’ll dodge bullets with a “woosh!”‘
Simply put, taking cover in Vanquish isn’t as important as anything else you can do.

Sam isn’t a hulking beast of a man. He’s incredibly mobile, relying on jet boosters to jettison himself from place to place in addition to his acrobatic maneuvers. Like Bayonetta, Sam can also slow down time when performing specific actions. For instance, shooting your gun while sliding around, vaulting over cover, or even just diving in any direction allows you to slow everything down for a bit, allowing you to watch the bullets and missiles whizzing by Sam’s head while focus-firing on whatever you can find nearby. While you do fire more slowly in slow-motion, it allows you to aim more precisely at specific targets or weak spots amidst all the chaos. But you can’t abuse this as often as you can abuse Witch Time.
Your ability to slow down time is tied to your suit’s energy, which is shared by just about all of your special abilities. Boosting around, slowing down time, certain melee attacks, and even forced slow-motion that activates when you’re about to die all draw from the same resource. Should you run out, you’re not that much better off than the dozens of space marine fodder you’re charging in with until it recharges. This is only amplified on higher difficulties.
Something to also consider is how the game rewards you for playing well, at least on lower difficulties. For starters, you can give your weapons slight upgrades by either collecting dedicated items, or by finding another weapon of the same type while you have full ammo for it. By doing this, you’re granted some additional ammo capacity, increased magazine sizes, and even additional damage at certain milestones, depending on which weapon you’re upgrading. Dying, however, bumps your upgrades down to their previous level once every mission.
Your weaponry plays a huge role in how you approach every scenario. There isn’t necessarily a “best” gun for every situation, unlike in some of Vanquish‘s counterparts. You’re limited to three at a time, along with two types of grenades, and each gun has its own unique functionality. Take the assault rifle: it has high ammo capacity and modest accuracy but low damage overall. The heavy machine gun boasts big damage at the cost of weaker range and lower magazine and ammo capacities. The shotgun is…well, a shotgun. But it’s more powerful than you’d think. Your grenades either stun or damage enemies outright too, making them excellent for multiple forms of crowd control.
RELATED: ‘Forgive Me Father 2’ Game Review: Cthulhu’s Comeback
This isn’t even mentioning the specialty weapons. The disc launcher can separate limbs and be used as a melee weapon without draining your suit’s energy. The LFE gun can hit targets multiple times in slow motion and even push enemies and other objects away. The sniper rifle can kill just about any weaker enemy with a single shot, at the cost of having to severely diminish your peripheral vision.
Then, there are all the mechanics that you may not notice right away. Tossing a grenade and subsequently entering slow-motion allows you to shoot it yourself, dealing even more damage than it would’ve done previously. Sam can light up a cigarette while in cover, and while it’s certainly comedic, it also doubles as an effective distraction against groups of enemies. On top of that, just about every gun has a unique melee attack for different situations.
Playing well doesn’t mean finding the best spots for cover, maintaining a quick trigger finger, and popping heads whenever they come out as if you’re playing long-distance Whack-a-Mole. At least, not completely. The different level layouts found throughout demand that you prioritize certain pockets of enemies to maximize your maneuverability. Managing your suit’s precious energy and avoiding just lounging around in cover is key to nailing high scores in this mission-based shooter. Some forms of cover don’t even last very long under fire, demanding that you move around regardless.
Short, Sweet, and God Hard

For better (or for worse, depending on your perspective), Vanquish is short. “Short,” as in, it takes just under six hours to complete a playthrough on Normal from start to finish if you dawdle around, and even less time once you have a hold on how to play effectively. But a single playthrough of Vanquish doesn’t really do it justice.
The more you play Vanquish, the more you understand the intricacies of its deliberate design decisions. The short length of the game’s missions means you can quickly learn how to react to the unpredictable forces being thrown at you, as well as acclimate yourself to the overwhelming tide of gargantuan machines attacking you from just about every angle. Nowhere is this more evident than in the game’s bosses.
A distilled version of what the game is all about, most bosses in Vanquish demand that you engage with them on an even playing field. Whether they’re big or small, they force you out into the open to actively fight back against their damaging attacks, often squeezing even more movement out of you to target their individual weaknesses. The game’s last two major bosses make playing aggressively their key focus, as one sees you constantly charging forward as they backpedal into a horde of their minions, whereas the other forces you into circular motions to avoid getting flanked throughout the entire battle.
RELATED: ‘Butcher’s Creek’ Game Demo Preview: ‘Manhunt’ Meets ‘Condemned’
The last battle, in particular, is an absolute menace. No spoilers, obviously. But you’re dealing with not one but two separate foes simultaneously that match, if not exceed, your own capabilities. They’re fast, they’re dynamic, and—most importantly—they can be a bit unpredictable. Their difficulty on God Hard is outright legendary at this point, and though completing God Hard doesn’t net you any in-game rewards, you’ll have the satisfaction of joining a select few who’ve successfully done so.
Speaking of which—God Hard. The apex challenge of Vanquish, God Hand is for those who’ve practically mastered just about everything there is to do in the game. Remixed enemy placements, additional enemy health and damage, lower energy and slower recharge speed for your suit, and a complete lack of weapon upgrades present an ungodly challenge that pushes Vanquish‘s aggressive direction as far as it can. Every battle has a handful of opportunities to push forward, and should you not seize them, you’ll be quickly ground into dust.
I certainly didn’t play it. But I definitely get its appeal.
Is Vanquish Worth Playing Today?

There’s a certain “sameyness” that comes with a lot of cover shooters. It’s the nature of the beast, after all. There are really only so many ways you can make a single idea unique and interesting, and once the well is mostly dry, all you’re left with is some wrinkled, pale imitation of what was once something full of potential.
If you really wanted to, you could absolutely play Vanquish like a regular cover shooter. There’s not really a direct incentive not to. Short of that growing percentage of time spent in cover, the game doesn’t go out of its way to actively punish you for this outside of its higher difficulties and maybe a handful of boss battles. Some may have walked away from Vanquish thinking that it was just like all the rest, albeit with its own little spin on the formula, as we mentioned previously.
But I think that’s a really reductive way of engaging with Vanquish. What you have here is a game that really lets you cut loose when you learn its many intricacies, one that flips the genre it borrows from on its head in favor of something that’s a lot more dynamic and mechanically interesting. It’s not as if cover shooters are necessary bad, it’s just hard to really find something to directly compare Vanquish to outside of its developer’s other games.
While Vanquish didn’t necessarily sell poorly, unlike PlatinumGames’ own MadWorld, it certainly wasn’t as much of a smash hit as Bayonetta. Chalk it up to its unconventional take on a popular genre, a growing saturation of other games in the genre, or its marketing not necessarily capitalizing on the right audience. Whatever it may have been, Vanquish simply didn’t make as big a splash as it could’ve. And that’s a real shame.
Especially now, as Vanquish on modern platforms has a lot more to offer than it did during its original release. Re-released on PC and on PlayStation 4/Xbox One in 2017 and 2020, respectively, the Vanquish remaster adds a bevy of technical improvements, visual enhancements, and an overall better degree of control compared to its original version. The PC version especially grants you a level of precision and performance that you could never find during its original seventh-generation release. Mouse aiming and lightning-fast load times make it easily one of the best-controlling cover shooters you could possibly find out there.
Marking Shinji Mikami’s first and only directorial credit at PlatinumGames, Vanquish is easily one of the most enjoyable games from the studio’s vast library. Knowing that this is one of the few times you’ll find a classic not only available on modern platforms but definitively enhanced compared to its original incarnation, you owe it to yourself to grab Vanquish if you’re at all interested in its action-packed antics. While I may not have originally grasped what it was going for way back when I first played it near its original release, I certainly appreciate what it was going for almost two decades later.
Vanquish is currently available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam.
We’re hardworking geeks who love to geek out, but we can’t do it without you! If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider tipping our writers. Also, as an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.