You. Yes, you! The person reading this. Have you ever strolled down the street on a crisp autumn day and thought to yourself “I could be playing the 2010 action game Vanquish, developed by PlatinumGames at the peak of their mastery, at this very moment?” If that thought has ever crossed your mind, then I have good news for you. There is, in fact, very little stopping you from playing one of the best action games ever made provided you have about twenty dollars and a platform to play it on.
If you do not know Vanquish, or only know about it vaguely by reputation, I’m excited for you. You may have overlooked it at the time because it was a third person cover shooter in 2010 and generally Japan was in a patchy place with releases in that era. Imagine the general growling tone and demeanor of Gears of War, but now imagine if it has held up well. You play Sam Gideon, voiced by Gideon Emery, an actor who also voiced Gideon in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Sam is a guy who works for DARPA, which in this universe is like being a Jedi.
Vanquish is basically if a cover shooter was a SHMUP, a dynamic that inverts the flow of a stodgy subgenre that died an ignoble death for good reason. Gideon’s suit primarily lets him do two things: slow down time in small increments or rocket boost while sliding on his knees. Instead of the chunky “roadie run”, you’re flying. You can also end a slide by meleeing quite hard, which sends an enemy flying and feels phenomenal. Like Godhand, parts of Resident Evil 4 and the oft-overlooked GameCube game P.N.03 before it, Vanquish has a performative, arcade-y feel as each encounter is aggressively scored. This is not meant to be a game that you consume and forget about, but a game where every encounter can be analyzed and replayed. Like Ninja Gaiden, you are meant to get better at playing Vanquish, and speedruns of the game are truly harrowing to watch.
Now is as good a time as any to bring up the fact that Sam Gideon smokes a whole lot. This is the extent of what many people know about this game, the left bumper lets Sam light up a cig and throw it while behind cover, which has tactical uses if you want to distract enemy fire. Though I personally think smoking is a terrible idea and have avoided it most of my life, it also makes Sam look cool as hell, which is not something you are supposed to admit any more. That said he’s also a cyborg or cyborg-adjacent, maybe he can’t get emphysema. I think we should encourage more cyborgs to blast cigs in games, because I simply don’t see that a lot in my day-to-day life.
Thoroughly explaining the plot of Vanquish would not really not benefit you that much. Some rough notes though: San Francisco gets hit with an orbital death laser that causes people to start exploding. President Elizabeth Winters, who looks suspiciously like Hillary Clinton (a move 2012’s Black Ops II would also pull) sends you to retaliate against Russia in orbit. This involves sending a galactic fleet to one of those rotating wheel space stations like in Citizen Sleeper or Gundam. Gideon’s coworkers are a woman floating in a holographic Minority Report interface named Elena, a bunch of marines, and a gigantic pissed guy named Lt. Col. Robert Burns, who looks like he’s there to directly make fun of Gears of War. They got veteran voice actor Steve Blum, voice of Spike Spiegel, to play Burns and both him and Gideon Emery are constantly growling at each other in such a similar timbre that you could mistake them for the same guy. If Gears of War is the goofy crystallization of the post-Iraq invasion, oorah pissed guy culture, then Vanquish is what happens when Japanese creators turn it inside out.
Vanquish was directed by Shinji Mikami and is the peak of his career post-Capcom. It’s easy to directly draw a throughline through the games he directed previously; the same lighthearted goofiness that’s in God Hand can be seen poking through, particularly when you dropkick an enemy in the stomach after rocketsliding at about fifty miles an hour. It also immediately preceded PlatinumGames’ work on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, one of the best games ever made and debatably the best Metal Gear game if you’re the kind of person that likes being confrontational with strangers on the internet. If you enjoy watching a cyborg do some of the sickest shit you’ve ever seen, either game will serve you well.
Replaying Vanquish is a reminder that, as the saying goes, they simply don’t make them like this any more. I know that my love of Vanquish is not tinted by the specific familiarity that comes from playing a weird game when it comes out, because I played it only in the last few years at the badgering of friends who kept saying “man, you gotta play Vanquish.” Few games like this stand the test of time and feel this good even now. They remastered the game a few years ago and rereleased it along with Bayonetta. Hell, you can throw it on your Steam Deck and it handles it with little trouble.
Vanquish is also a bittersweet game in context because it’s debatable that the PlatinumGames that made this game as well as the specific environment that fostered it into being still exist. Platinum has had a few rough years lately. Their last big game was Bayonetta 3 and the less said about Babylon’s Fall the better. Much of its staff left and most of its prominent figures have gone off to do their own thing. Mikami himself went to found Tango Gameworks and left it in 2023 before its closure by Microsoft and revival by Krafton, only then found another studio named Kamuy. One hopes that Ninja Gaiden 4 can herald a turning point for Platinum; there are hints of the old Platinum buried in that deeply confusing game. That said, the task of being forced to do the lion’s share of Team Ninja’s dirty work in recreating a technical masterpiece while also being published by Xbox Game Studios in 2025 are not things I would wish on my worst enemy.
But perhaps it is more productive to focus on the good times, on a single, impossible game like Vanquish, which can be bought for just under twenty American dollars, often less, and which you may have sitting in your Steam library right now, waiting for a moment like this.
