You guys may have heard that I rather enjoyed Platinum Games’ Bayonetta earlier this year. Because of that I’ve been following the developer a little more closely than in the past and I’m starting to hear rather excellent things about their next project: Vanquish.

Vanquish is a futuristic third person shooter which, whilst being a relatively well trodden path for Western developers, is not a genre often produced in Japan. Shinji Mikami, creator of the resident evil games, is the game director and that should be enough to get anyone excited. Although the team behind the game are entirely different from the one that worked on Bayonetta what they do have in common is a passion for creating action games. This blend of the type of thrills normally reserved for an action game with the viscerality we’ve seen in many third person games before could well lead to a rather superb fusion of Eastern and Western ideas.

The basic story of Vanquish involves the Russians taking control of a space station and using it against the US. The player is then sent in to try and fix things. If you take a look at the trailer or any of the screenshots then I think you’ll agree that the game looks absolutely superb, and so far I can only imagine how good it looks in motion.



Players take on the role of Sam Gideon who is one of the soldiers sent to take back the space station. Sam wears the ARS (augmented reality suit) armour which he has specially designed (yes, that’s right, he wears the arse suit). The main use of this rather cool looking armour is a dash ability which allows Sam to get up close and personal with the robot army being used by the Russians to control the station.
Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen from the game so far is that all of the weapons are basically one unit which transforms on the fly into a gun of the players choosing. No hunting around for the perfect weapon for each situation here then. Ammo is also interchangeable which should mean that the combat is able to maintain a steady flow of awesomeness.



With the game only scheduled to release this coming November there’s still relatively few details out about it but hopefully I’ve given you enough of a taster that I won’t be the only one following Platinum games over the next few months. I’ll be sure to keep you all informed of any new info that gets released.