Vanquish - Velocity: Demo Impressions

Vanquish: Velocity is a third person shooter brought to us by Platinum Games, creators of Bayonetta and Mad World. Quite a departure from the aforementioned titles, Vanquish is incredibly fast, shooty, explodey and all the other things squidgy shooter fans like me demand from a game.

First off, I want to mention the Start Game menu. The Start Game menu in this game is so cool I spent a minute or so just flicking back and forth between “New Game”, “System”, and “Exit”. It shows a futuristic, cylindrical city and when you change menu item the perspective moves and shows you different parts. It’s glorious and more games should have fancy Start Game screens, like Bionic Commando for example.

So I eventually get round to pressing “New Game” and within seconds of starting up the demo I was rock ‘n’ roll knee sliding from cover to cover, while shooting enemies in their stupid robot faces and taking the occasional break to have a smoke (press LB in cover). The controls are as natural as can be, probably because they don’t differ much from most other third person shooters, but it’s still nice not to need to do a tutorial to work out which button aims. If you’ve ever played a third person shooter on a console before this should come quite naturally, although you can change the button configuration (but you can't customise it).



In the midst of the gunfire, grenades, explosions and bodies I found myself wowed by the graphics, smooth textures on every surface and being, the air constantly full of particles moving independently and dynamic lighting on what seemed to be EVERYTHING. At first I thought they must be tricking us by having tiny enclosed environments to pull all this stuff off, but as I looked up to the ceiling I saw nothing but the other side of the cylinder that is the city. I looked off into the distance and was amazed by the sheer amount of detail afforded even long ways away, no flat texture background, all fully rendered. This really is a game you need to see to believe. The animations are great too, whenever you change gun it simply morphs in your hand into the gun you want. It’s a shame you don’t get much of a chance to appreciate it, what with all the knee sliding and shooting you need to do on a millisecond by millisecond basis.

So I defeated the enemy platoon facing down me and my buddies, smacked down a big robot, smacked down an even BIGGER robot and then boom. Demo over. Probably the shortest demo I’ve ever played, no joke. It gave me an end mission screen, but I really hope that was just the last fraction of a full mission as it barely lasted 5 minutes, and that’s with me dying a couple of times.

All in all from what I’ve seen in the Vanquish demo I think I will be getting it at some point. Probably not on release, probably not shortly after it but I wouldn’t hesitate to add it to my collection if I found myself with money to spare. I recommend that you download the demo, it’s up on PSN and XBLA. Enjoy!