This May, SuperPod Game Club played and reviewed the excellent Sega should-be-classic Vanquish! If you haven't heard of or played this game, you're in for a treat. This game was added to a wildcard poll by Thrak.

Vanquish is a third-person shooter released for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows in 2010. It was remastered for Xbox One and PS4 in 2020.

Let's see what everyone had to say! And as always, if you'd like to join SuperPod Game Club, check out the Game Club page or join our Discord server.

Thrak

Maybe my favorite Platinum game? It's a hard one to say considering I haven't played every game they've made and the ones I have played make strong arguments (Bayonetta 1 & 2, Astral Chain) but after beating Vanquish a second time for this I gotta say it was even better.

Shinji Mikami directs this as his final project at Platinum before he leaves to form Tango Gameworks, I wonder how they're doing? Anyway, this game absolutely fucks. You are a soldier in this futuristic suit of armor that has the ability to tank hits, slide around Pete Towneshed style and even slow down time! The fuck is this?! Why doesn't every soldier have this kickass suit? That aside, it's a super fun fast-paced third person shooter with a nonsensical story about an invasion of evil robots that turns into conspiracy and heel turns and all that shibazz, but who cares? Story is not what makes this game great, it is the gameplay. The controls are tight and responsive, the assortment of weapons is great with each one being viable for a full game playthrough, there's a bit of melee combat, cover mechanics and the aforementioned sliding and time slow down.

It boils down to about a 6 hr or so thrill ride that never stops to smell the dead robots, but by the end you puff on a cigarette and go "Hot damn, that was good". I can't recommend this game enough. It's available on PS4, Xbox One and PC through the 10 year anniversary bundle with Bayonetta 1 and it is more than worth your time on those consoles. Runs at a solid 60 FPS which is needed for a twitch-based action game such as this. Please play this one.

Tony

Vanquish is one of those games that kind of got lost in the shuffle when it was released and it has gained a bit of a cult following. And man what a game this was, while I found the story to be pretty bland, the gameplay itself was as solid as you’d expect from PlatinumGames.

The main gimmick is the sliding mechanic, which lets you weave in and out of combat like nobody’s business. Combining it with your ability to slow down time and you’ll be sliding all over the place taking down enemies like nobody’s business. There is a caveat tho, your shield, slowdown and even some of the weapons use energy from your power suit. If you haphazardly run straight into battle and don’t keep an eye on the energy meter, you will get completely stomped. So it’s best to strategize a bit, find a main weapon that fits your playstyle and change your sub-weapon loadout depending on the situation.

The game is fairly short, clocking in around 6-8 hours and it hits the ground running right out the gate. If you’re looking for a fast and frantic action game, you can’t do any better than Vanquish.

Aaron

Vanquish is a game that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Thankfully, SuperPod Game Club decided on this game for the month and drew some fresh new eyes to it.

To keep things short and sweet, this game rules. This was my second playthrough of the game, so I played on hard difficulty and that feels like the definitive way to play the game. You need to be on the move at all times, never staying in cover for too long, as the enemies will know what you're doing and lob grenades or gigantic energy blasts to hit you while in cover. The enemy variety is also really nice. Every shootout felt like it was forcing me to make strategic decisions about which enemies to take out in what order. I also appreciate how the game feels like it wants you to swap weapons in order to adapt to different types of enemies - like dropping your shotgun and picking up a sniper to score some headshots on distant enemies, or ditching your assault rifle in favor of the lock-on laser so you can take out more than one enemy at a time.

The slip-n-slide mechanic is what really sets this game apart. You can essentially boost-slide to cover, toward an enemy, or just to a door at breakneck speeds. If you boost-slide to an enemy and hit the melee button, you'll do a sweet jumping kick that does a ton of damage. You can even boost-slide into into your weapon in slow motion and buy yourself some time. Oh, and don't forget to smoke a cig while you're in cover.

What I don't like about this game is the story, which is incredibly weak. Go read about that on Wikipedia if you really want to. I also don't care for the grizzly voice actors they chose for Sam and Burns. They kind of sound the same, and they're so grating that it sounds like every single word brings them excruciating pain.

This game isn't perfect, but it's rad as hell and you totally should play it if you consider yourself a fan of PlatinumGames. It's basically just like Bayonetta, but with way more bullets and robots.

Dave C.

After taking a short hiatus from Super Game Club the past two months, I was excited to jump into Vanquish, a game that had been languishing first on my Xbox One and then on my Xbox Series X since it appeared on Games with Gold in May 2018. And yes, I had to go check a full list of Games with Gold games to see exactly how long I have owned this game. Until I began the game, all I knew was Vanquish is a third-person shooter. As this was my first time playing, I was ready to trust the praise of other Super Game Club members who played the game before.

Vanquish is a single-player third-person shooter with a relatively short campaign mode. The game keeps track of the player’s individual mission time completion, total game time completion, and about a dozen other statistics such as enemy kills, allies helped, and time spent in cover. This statistic tracking suggests the game’s repeatability and a potential score-chasing approach to enjoying the game. After a few opening missions, the variety in objectives provided entertaining changes of paces, including sections of missions on moving conveyor belts, of moving along high-speed rails while under pursuit from helicopters, and of fleeing across destructible and collapsible bridges and buildings, just to name a few. I also enjoyed the bosses near the middle and at the end of each act that ranged from house-sized walking tanks to nimble flying humanoids.

Setting Vanquish apart from other shooters I have played is the agile, high velocity slip-n-slide movement that the game encourages the player to use. I admit that over my six-hour playtime, I never felt entirely slick, cunning, or proficient at zipping around the combat zones with the power slide. I was more likely to sit in cover like other third-person shooters, then zip away from danger using the power slide if enemies posed too great or too immediate a threat. The feel of shooting the ten or so different weapons all felt good, but my movement would not dazzle any observers. However, my initial clumsiness in controlling my character gave way to adequate running, gunning, ducking into cover, and occasional power sliding.

While the gameplay and gunplay are enjoyable for both a casual playthrough like mine and for someone looking to min/max fast times and high scores, the nearly inconsequential story leaves a lot to be desired. The skeleton of a story left me often wondering where exactly I was going and for what exact reason, but this posed little issue in the actual gameplay of following the next objective marker to the next combat area. Our protagonist Sam Gideon is a stereotypical fast talking, cigarette smoking hotshot. The dialogue interspersed between and during missions was often muscle headed and bland, even though Sam seemingly is quite intelligent and had a large part in designing his highly technological battle suit. Eventually, the script during the plot’s climax attempted to make me care about the betrayals of certain parties while still other parties were using the incitement of war as a tool for national economic stimulus. But the lack of plot development beyond a surface level left me unable to care.

Steve

So here's the thing about video games. A long time ago, you were usually in space fighting aliens. Or at least Space-adjacent fighting aliens. Or maybe you were still pretty close to space fighting the Commie-Nazis. You know, because that Cold War was on and we all knew what that kind of enemy was. The point being is that video games were kinda simple. Shoot bad guys. Do not get shot by bad guys. Easy-ish stuff to follow.

Vanquish is kinda like that. You're a guy in a metal suit with a smoking habit following around army guys led by a bigger guy in a metal suit with a worse smoking habit and you shoot Robo-Russians for 5 levels. The game's made by a burgeoning Platinum. It's not trying to make a bigger point than “blow all this shit up and make it look really cool”, and that's OK in 2010, and it's still OK in 2025 when you probably got this in a pack with Bayonetta for $10 or less. 

Not sure what else to say this time. If you ever loved blowing things up on your 8 or 16 bit console, Vanquish is definitely a great way to spend an evening or three, but if you were hoping for a more meaningful commentary on the military industrial complex, Vanquish doesn't have that for you. Vanquish has a lot of guns that you shoot and are shot at you, and that's OK. Great even.

And that's all, folks! June's game has been decided - Mega Man X2! Keep your eyes peeled for our next reviews later this month.

OKAY BYE.