Introduction
Vanquish is a game by SEGA that feels like the bastard offspring of a bad Vietnam movie and Gundam. It’s a third-person action game centred around a D-Day style assault on an O’Neill platform in space in a desperate attempt to avert a high-tech terror attack on New York.Story
You take the part of Sam Gideon, a power-suit test pilot for DARPA working on the new ARS, Augmented Reaction Suit, a next-generation power-suit with configurable weapon system (called a blade) and a reaction-boosting system along with many other updates and augmentations. While you’re testing the configuration of the suit, San Francisco is subjected to a microwave beam attack from space. The Order of the Russian Star, an ultra-nationalist Russian group – has invaded one of the O’Neill platforms and turned its energy transfer system into a weapon, threatening to subject New York to a similar, devastating attack.

The US President refuses to back down and a massive Marine assault is launched on the orbiting city with Sam tagging along due to the involvement of his boss in the design of the microwave energy transfer system and secret orders to try and extract him from the station.

You fight your way up through the station to try and access the control room and stave off the attack, battering your way through section after section and uncovering more aspects and layers to the plot, all in the company of gung-ho marines and their heartless, grizzled commander working to their own agenda and bristling against your presence.

Gameplay
The game is a third person shooter with several special abilities accessible to the player. A turbo-boost that lets you slide across the ground at high speed, a similiarly powered melee attack that can punch through heavy armour, a configurable weapon (that can store three different weapon systems within it), a high speed reaction system (bullet time) and access to grenades, both explosive and EMP.

You’ll use all these abilities passing through the levels, swapping weaponry as need be and the EMP weapons are particularly useful as most of the enemies that you come up against are robotic. Most of the time you’re up against legions of lower powered robotic enemies but there are also frequent boss battles against more gigantic and dangerous robots that need to be approached in a more tactical manner.

One nice touch is that when you’re under heavy attack and taking a lot of damage, the bullet-time reaction system kicks in automatically, giving you a good chance to get out of trouble and not die unnecessarily and horribly.

Controls
Controls are a little hectic, the game is high speed and very frantic most of the time. As with most console games I find the thumbsticks to be a little clumsy for aiming in action games and this makes playing without the auto-aim compensation functions a bit too tricky for my liking, especially in critical situations. It’s also somewhat annoying that you don’t get true freedom of movement – such as the ability to jump. Early in the game this can get you bottled up a few times until you come to try different tacks that are less intuitive.

Atmosphere
The game maintains the atmosphere of a high-octane action film right from after the tutorial section and doesn’t really let up. It’s unrelentingly macho, gung-ho and hectic to the point where you don’t get much of a breather to consider the wider game or its context. This might be a good thing as the plot is really paper thin, but the endless action more than makes up for that.

Graphics
The graphics are excellent during combat, though some of the cutscenes can be more than a little wooden and the game is built for speed, not those more lingering scenes. The game has a fairly clean graphical style, somewhat reminiscent of PN03 on the Gamecube. The surroundings, the O’Neill platform itself, is much more evocative of the idealised illustrations of the concept from the 1970s when space seemed to be in our grasp as a species. The enemy robots are very well designed and put in mind of the Volgan robots from ABC Warriors – which is no bad thing at all.

Conclusion
A fun, slightly odd, highly stylistic shooting game that’s a lot of fun to play through, though so hectic and packed with action that it can be a bit exhausting to play.

On the Plus Side