I beat Vanquish yesterday, and also the full release of Circadian Dice came out so I beat the last couple things they added and got to the credits.
With Vanquish, I’d seen the game for 360 maybe three hundred and sixty times whenever I went to EB games. They used to have at least a dozen copies in the bargain bin, which made me think the game was a Brink or Crysis sort of thing, and also not very good.
I played this game on hard for my first time, which was a mistake. It didn’t give me much opportunity to experiment and have an easy time styling. It generally feels like hard is where the game starts in character action, but we all need a kinetic manual from time to time. Because of the difficulty, my first session with the game (The first 3 acts) ended up feeling very frustrating since I wasn’t using the defensive mechanics properly (thrown smokes, defensive melee, quick headshots, defensive weapons like the big ball blaster).
The last two acts were a lot of fun once I started to engage with the game on it’s own terms. After doing a bit of reading online, realising that the upgrade system was fairly insubstantial was a big mind set changer, and it made me give up a lot of my goblin like tendencies that were holding the game back. I think I was killing off a lot of my fun by trying to optimise my ammo management. Bit annoying that the upgrade mechanic is tied to playing the game in the most tepid way possible. Style as the ranking and reward system continues to be undefeated.
I was surprised at how much Halo was in this game. I saw Halo in the enemy silhouettes which were quite elite like, the ring colony the game takes place on, the vehicle design, the lush green scenery, the cyber lady in your head, even the initial tutorial with the sight calibration. Maybe Halo 2’s DNA was this present in all cover shooters of the time and I just forget since I was mostly playing Kingdom Hearts and Pokemon at the time, but I felt a great deal of Halo in almost all of the design work.
I do like that rather than having a bulbous Boris as our antagonist, we have a Vitas esque twink. He still looked pretty strong but having the slender sophisticated Russian be the mirror of our football throwing, cigarette smoking assault trooper was great. I got the feeling that Sam is a bit too stupid for his position in the story and most of the ideas the other characters are bringing up are sliding right off his brain.
I’ve only ever played Platinum games the one time, even though I know they have a lot of die hards out there. It just always feels like you can cancel too many things into other things without any real weight behind the canceling action, which less makes me feel like the protagonist is dexterous like it would in Ninja Gaiden and more like nothing has any weight to it. There was also a lot of one shot trickery in here that never felt nice. Still, pretty good.
Also, why was there so much Candide stuff in this game? I guess a developer was just reading it at the time and managed to get it in. Are other Platinum games like this?
Circadian dice owns hard style but also it looks like:
So if you like strategy please give it a shot. It’s my favorite turn based game released this decade.
