taw's blog: Vanquish - the game Doom tried to be

Tuesday, June 04, 2019

Vanquish - the game Doom tried to be

This picture of armored dude shooting while sliding on rocket boots is very representative of what kind of game Vanquish is

I finally have a bit of free time to play games from my list. Most of the games are fairly whatever, but sometimes I find a real gem.

One such really fun game is Vanquish. To be fair, I might be biased, as I absolutely love first person shooters (and third person shooters are almost first person shooters), but Vanquish has very positive reception everywhere.

So it's a shooter, but instead of tactically running from cover to cover, it's just stupid fun all the way. You get rocket shoes, slow motion mode which triggers automatically when you're screwed, good deal of armor, nice variety of overpowered weapons, and a lot of enemies to kill. There's good variety of enemies, and a lot of bosses on the way. Controls are a bit nonstandard (you don't have to skip the tutorial), but movement feels really smooth.

Apparently this game was released on consoles back in 2010, but who cares, amirite? Graphics aren't anything amazing, as can be expected from a port from previous generation consoles, but everything is fast paced enough it doesn't matter all that much.

Doom tried to be this game

There was a fairly similar game, the rebooted Doom. It also tried to move away from cover based shooters, and get something more close and personal. In my opinion Doom failed miserably at it, while Vanquish utterly succeeds.

So combat in Doom and Vanquish is a lot of fun, no question about it. The difference is that Vanquish goes from combat to combat, with just a bit of breathing room and some mild cutscenes, while Doom would force the player to waste half an hour of their life wandering around the damn dungeon looking for some key card, or turn into a damn platformer. I'm pretty sure I died more often to fall damage than to enemies, and had to alt tab to find where those damn key cards were quite a few times before dropping Doom in disappointment.

The idea was probably to introduce some breaks between combat, but what Doom introduced weren't short breathers, it was pointless frustration and waste of time. By the time next combat happened I was more likely to be fed up with the game than excited.

Games are not movies

Anyway, even disregarding awful execution, the whole idea of breaks between fun sections is bad. Movies have them, because they last 3 hours without breaks, and watching action into action without any breaks gets tedious after a while. Participating in action does not - people often play games for whole nights.

Players also are far more in control than movie watchers. If you need a break for a snack, bathroom, cigarette, or whatever, just pause anytime, then get back to the action. Need a longer break? Quit or alt tab, and come back to it next day. It's nothing like the passive cinema experience. You don't have to play the whole game in one sitting.

Forced boredom sections in games are just a horrible idea. Stop treating games like movies.

And actually, while Vanquish doesn't have long breaks away from actions, it has so much diversity in kinds of action, with just the right amount of short breaks and short cutscenes, that it never feels monotonous.