Yeah the demo pretty much set it up to be the only contender for GOTY for me, bizarrely having Platinum compete soley with themselves.

I pre-ordered mine off Zavvi which means I'll get it a bit late, seeing as shipping to sweden takes about a week. I'll certainly be playing this eventually though.


Off to pick up DJ Hero 2 on monday aswell.

Yeah, Vanquish is the only contender to Bayo - Platinum competing with itself. :)

Bayo is so massively good I honestly don't think this'll trump it though. But hey, Platinum is in a win/win situation regardless.

Vanquish, mother effers! Potential GOTYliciousness rocket slided on its knees into my mail today. Will get around to playing it as soon as I'm done with some responsible grown up stuff.

Two acts in and I'm frankly disappointed. I think it may pick up as I replay it some and I'm more familiar with the surroundings and I can shave seconds off my completion times and whatnot, but there's enough unfortunate/uninspired level and scenario layout to make me profoundly disappointed in how the final game compares to the demo.

The demo had a superb layout that changed character a ton over the course of its runtime, twisting and turning the level to have you fighting in all manners of positions and vantage points while becoming increasingly familiar with it, not just through restarting the demo but through how it led you through its surroundings and set encounters up.

The final game all too often throws decidedly sub par and downright boring layouts at you, large areas where the only thing growing increasingly familiar - and frankly, stale - are the core mechanics which really aren't that strong when the game lets up on the pressure and just litters bots here and there, shooting half heartedly from cover. The whole thing is further punctuated by having that bearded twat bark things at you constantly. What a bastard. Oh and it takes two to tango, so it's convenient then that main protagonist Sam is really a cockhead aswell, shouting equally obnoxious things as comebacks. At one point they talk about teleporters and Sam goes "AND ONE TIME WE SENT A RAT THROUGH AND IT LITERALLY HAD ITS HEAD SHOVED UP ITS ASS!" What a charming man. Sometimes I wish I could just slide boost him off a fucking cliff.

I think, as I said, that I'll grow more fond of it over multiple playthroughs as I can actually properly ace these levels and just hurl myself through them (and skip the absolutely hair grayingly boring arse cutscenes for one! FUCK YOU people who can't take the delicious, mental delights of a Bayonetta and need games to be this soul erodingly straight faced and montone!) but it's far from the bliss inducing home run I honestly was starting to expect.

Bayo is safe on its GOTY throne for me. I even played it some tonight just to show it to a friend, ended up playing about 1/4 of it and muppety effing madness, it is an addictive, ludicrously playable joy of a video game.

It just spends way too much time not being the japanese, super technical video game it briefly can be, and all too often falls back on being a pretty conventional, western third person shooter. And when it does, it is so INFINITELY worse than Gears 2 in every single regard that it's just depressing.

It lifts entire sections out of Gears of War 2, too, and tries to amp them up by just making things in the periphery move faster or whatever, but the core gameplay just isn't an impressive cover based shooter. Far from it. Just picking off dudes from a distance is **so boring**, and yet it actually keeps cutting off the things that make Vanquish unique.

The demo eased my mind by not really trying to be a Gears, but rather employing level design that emphasised the things unique to vanquish, but the full game just has you forgetting that stuff during long stretches of time.

I am REALLY bummed out by it. It would be bearable if during those stretches it had some charm or enthusiasm to patch things up, but all you get are these two awful characters grunting, with essentially faceless army dudes keep falling down stuff and having to be pulled back up, or lagging behind when a door is about to close. I guess they're building some kind of "leave noone behind" morale thing but GOD I DON'T CARE.

I'm actually considering abandoning the game for now to come back to it when I'm way more... I dunno. When I've adjusted my expectations or something.

I could go pick this game up for $15 new, but I already have a stack of new releases in shrink wrap, one more won't help me. I liked the demo, but Simon's reactions seem to be indicative of what I thought would be the case at the onset. That and it really was total sensory overload at times.

Well thing is, as long as Vanquish is a sensory overload I think it's fucking awesome. As long as you're juggling a shit ton of stuff at once - and make it work - Vanquish can be totally blissful. It's when it comes down from that high and falls back on more conventional third person shooter tropes, that it's way too feeble as a "subtle" and slow paced game to feel exciting or fun.

The demo is, to me, GOTY* material from start to finish. If the full game was consistently that, I think my face would've melted by now, and I'd use its sticky paste like material to write GOTY on the table in front of me. Sometimes, it IS that game and I AM that excited, but there's still a horribly disappointing amount of the other thing.

As I've gotten further into it and things are ramping up, it does seem to veer more towards shit hitting the fan-ness, and I WILL reserve final judgement until I've finished it and played it some on the higher settings. Higher settings may well populate the scarce areas better and put more pressure on you, letting the unique features of Vanquish kick in proper, and if that is the case then my issues will mostly melt away along with my face.

Boost melee into someone makes you flip back, press left trigger to aim in air for slow mo to pick a guy off with sniper, switch to shotgun in mid slowmo and pick off a dude on the ground under you, land, boost into cover to reload, flip out of cover and aim in flip to land into slow mo on knees, switch back to sniper and pick off a dude controlling a mech, boost up to mech and climb aboard to control it and fire missiles into a group of dudes behind some cover, jump down, boost slide on knees over group of dead enemies and snatch up the weapons/ammo they dropped with RB, and roar off into another encounter.

See when that fucking.. symphony kicks in, Vanquish is truly brilliant, but when it gets too scarce to have those things happen, it's a plodding, average cover shooter.


*If there wasn't already a little game this year called Bayonetta, effing that chance up for the other ones in my book

Revised statement time!

Well, sort of.

The later half of the game has much, much better level design that actually funnels you and enemies in a way that sets up just the kind of encounters that make Vanquish shine.

It seems odd in hindsight that the initial levels are so poor, but I'm starting to think that maybe there's a curve to the game on Normal that doesn't include having played the demo over and over and over and knowing more or less exactly how to play the game before it's even begun.

I'll still let my criticisms stand because they're still accurate when the game does commit those vices, but I am ALSO suspecting more and more that ramping up the difficulty will actually populate previously sedate portions of the game. If that is the case, then gravely bastard characters and rediculously unironic plot be damned, this is one hell of a game.

I'll report back.

I am, ultimately, pretty disappointed.

I should stress, though, that I have pretty high demands on cover systems after Gears 2, and I even found Uncharted 2 lacking in that department - arguably the best emulation of Gears' system - and Vanquish falls shorter still. I think if you know yourself to be either unfamiliar with Gears 2 cover system or just not a super technical player, Vanquish has a lot of speed and slickness to it that may well spice things up during its downtime/conventional shooter moments, but it's in truly expecting an arcade thing taken up to the level of Bayonetta that it is *sorely* lacking.

I never want to discourage anyone from playing a video game, ever. I've had fun with things other people would throw in the trash, and find GTA4 and Bioshock unfulfilling as games, so don't take my word for it here. Try the demo and test everything out properly. Even though the demo encourages and very much can be played flipping out the way Vanquish does best, get a feel for the core cover system and know that stretches of the game really do fall back on those.

The game really does have moments where I find it extremely enjoyable, and I certainly don't regret buying it. I will probably return to this down the line knowing full well what it turned out to be, and have a good time with it.

I think it's a rare occasion these days where I actually hyped myself up too much. But bright side? I'm definitely gonna get back into Bayo now.