Today we are going to take a look at Vanquish’s PC port. This futuristic third person shooter promises revolutionary movement abilities and great gunplay. All that for a very reasonable price of 19 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.
- Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me
and subcribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel
Video Review
Text Review
So Vanquish – a game that has already been released previously in the year 2010 is now finally after almost 7 long years of waiting available for the PC platform as well. And was the wait worth it? Hell yeah!
Gameplay
So let’s start with a quick overview of the gameplay. Vanquish is a very fast paced shooter, just a quick tutorial and you are thrown straight into the action. And you guys know how much I love being thrown into the action quickly. There aren’t any long session of you running around almost completely useless, just do the tutorial, watch a few cut-scenes (that BTW skippable from the very first playthrough) and maniacally laugh as you are having a blast blasting enemies into their graves. If that isn’t a perfect introduction to a shooter I don’t really know what is.
The shooting itself feels the pretty good, though it does carry two burdens. First one is the fact that this was originally a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 release, so it does feel a bit too “console-like” for us PC gamers. You don’t have to aim super precisely to hit enemies and the cover system is used prominently. I would lie if I said that I liked these two features, but honestly, it isn’t that bad.
The second issue is the fact that 7 years have passed since the creation of this game. It has honestly matured better then anyone could have expected, but you can still feel that certain shooting mechanics feel a bit dated, even by console standards.
I specially dislike the fact that you can carry only 4 weapons at a time, specially if you are a futuristic super-soldier and you weapons are just morphing one to another. It makes sense in a World War II. Game, but not here.
At least you have a pretty decent selection of weapons, ranging from the expected things like a shotgun or an assault rifle up to weird powerful things like a rocket launcher or even… a disk thrower – probably the weirdest weapon I even laid my eyes on. The weapons do feel somewhat … well, again, consoly … but that is understandable and you won’t really care in the heat of the action that much.
On the other hand, the movement feels sooo awesome! The fact that you can slide around for pretty decent chunks of time, makes you feel (and really be) incredibly agile. You can slide from one cover to another, shooting a few baddies on the go and then just do that again. Well, until you suit overheats. But the game is pretty generous with this mechanic and you can slide for longer periods then you would expect. I know… I know, these days the sliding mechanic has been used in a few games, but this is the original and it does it really well.
Apart from the movement, there also is essentially bullet-time. And it is accessible in two ways, first, you can access it manually, by clicking the right mouse button during an evade. Or, it will trigger automatically, by you getting damaged so much you are close to dying, thus allowing you to get out of sticky situations.
But altogether, this is a very good, only slightly dated third person shooter in terms of it mechanics. Whenever you will be sliding around the place, you will feel like an absolute bad-ass, but this feeling is slightly offset by the need for being in cover very often and the fact that you don’t need to aim absolutely precisely. I wish the port also took a look at the shooting mechanics, taking these slightly dated things and modernizing them, but I understand that that would be asking a bit too much.
Graphics
Okay, that’s it for this review about the gameplay. There are plenty of more in depth reviews you can find online from the past.
Now it’s time to talk a bit about the graphics. So, keeping in mind that this is a seven year old game, it does look amazing. Yes the textures could use a bit more detail, yes the particle effects aren’t really the best you have ever seen, but they do still look very good and won’t really disappoint you.
Performance
Now on to the performance part of the review. This one will be slightly longer then it is usual for my reviews, but not by much. But let’s start with the very basics. The game runs well on any system, runs at xx framerate, you can easily swap between a mouse/keyboard combo and a controller
There are a few issues like secondary bindings not displaying correctly in menus (but working in game) or black bars if you aren’t using a 16:9 resolution (though this one is solvable through a special launcher), but none of them make the game play any less awesome.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion: The port of Vanquish is an awesome port. If you are looking for a great 3rd person shooter, Vanquish will definitely suit your needs. On top of that, it will run on pretty much any gaming computer anyone owns these days. The price tag of 20 dollars is pretty well placed in my opinion as well.
disclaimer: All images have been used directly from the games Steam page