Video games have revolved around avoiding attacks since its inception. Dodge the missiles of the other player in
Spacewar!, shoot back at them. Avoid the ghosts in Pacman, collect the dots. Don't run into the Goombas in
Super Mario Bros., jump on top of them. It's a natural, instinctual reaction when combat is the primary mode of interaction. For every chance you get to hit something, there's an equal chance you're going to get hit in the process. This dichotomy is best represented in shooters and shoot 'em ups, as combat is so heavily involved in these games, and it's in these genres where deviations and experimentations of this formula have flourished. First-person shooters have gone from circle strafing to deal out and avoid damage to implementing a constantly recharging shield for your character in combat, thereby changing tactical consideration from “using the most powerful weapon to dispatch the enemy as quickly as possible in order to preserve health” to “experimenting with the systems and mechanics of the game and enjoying the reactions of your choices”. Third-person shooters, a genre that was slow to find its voice in the market originally, have taken huge strides with the implementation of a cover system. Here, the player is not only paying attention to how and where their character is positioned, but also how long they need to stay our of cover in order to take out an opponent, and finding openings to move forward in the battle and flank their targets. Shoot 'em ups stuck on a relatively linear progression of change where dodging attacks and shooting back at enemies was the modus operandi right up until the bullet hell evolution. Where previous shoot 'em ups only had you avoid simple enemy fire, bullet hell shooters had you avoid a maze of bullets that covered the screen, darting around the slow moving projectiles as you nervously shot back. It was a fascinating twist on the genre that was promptly subverted by the fine folk at Treasure with
Ikaruga, a shooter that made the player deliberately crash into bullets and absorb them – provided their ship was the right colour. Projectiles were divided into two categories, black and white, and by switching your ship's polarity to match the attacks, the player could fly through the bullets unharmed. This simple switch up altered the way a player approached the battlefield – instead of moving in between the spaces of gunfire, you were confined to following the path of your enemy's attacks. It was brilliant and inventive design that could never be replicated in the same genre without severely impugning on some form of copyright, or facing the wrath of a thousand fanboys.
Vanquish, despite being a third-person shooter, has very prominent bullet hell shooter elements. Normally, the developments inside of the shoot 'em up genre are divorced from the developments of first and third-person shooters. Shoot 'em ups are difficult, high score focused relics of a period when video games were only about that – the very definition of a niche genre. But, the decision to meld the mechanics of a third-person shooter with the underpinnings of a bullet hell shooter made
Vanquish a much more approachable, and entirely unique, shooter in the swirling sea of
Gears of War knock offs.
The most noticeable aspect of
Vanquish's beating bullet hell shooter heart is that there's gunfire everywhere. Enemies hound you on foot with excessive bullet fire, and bunches of missiles rocket straight up into the air, twisting and curling about, before spiralling down to hit you. Foot soldiers are mixed with giant, hulking robots and powerful vehicles and quickly spread out in all directions. The traditional
Gears of War controls couldn't hope to adequately cover the sheer amount of action happening on screen in
Vanquish. The slow, hulking, weighty movement of Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago work best when confined to a tunnel. Enemies come towards you in
Gears of War and you press through them, always going forward. There's no reason to backtrack in
Gears of War because the game isn't designed with that in mind. Even the controls reflect this attitude by placing the ability to turn around on the right analogue stick. Moving left and right on the left analogue stick simply makes Marcus strafe left and right, always facing forward.
Vanquish, with its enemies coming from all directions, doesn't have the luxury for these type of controls and in recognising this, the developers have freed up the right analogue stick for camera and aiming only and designated movement entirely to the left one. Sam Gideon doesn't strafe, he runs in every direction at the same pace regardless. This diverse range of movement means that combat is as much about dealing damage as it is about avoiding it; the fundamental core of the bullet hell shooter.
This freedom of movement also extends to the use of cover. Cover is your lifeline in
Gears of War but is mostly temporary in
Vanquish. I actually died more by bunkering behind cover than I did from simply being out in the open. The main reason is because cover is destructible and enemies are all too eager to destroy it as soon as possible. There's also never really a point in the levels where you can dive behind cover and hope to be reasonably covered from every angle. Chances are that while you may be covered from gunfire in one direction, the soaring, curling missiles will rain down on you at any moment and force you out of safety, or a group of enemies will flank you from another point. It means that
Vanquish has a great sense of pace – you're always on the run and trying to find the best position to attack your opponents from, no matter how short lived it is. Cover is a charade in
Vanquish, a left over fragment of the third-person shooter genre in order to ease the player into a sense of familiarity.
The biggest giveaway of
Vanquish's bullet hell shooter aspirations comes from the inclusion of a score bar, that most archaic system of video game design. Not only do you get points from killing enemies but they're also deducted when you die, or when you stay behind cover for too long (another reason to avoid cover at all times). It's a system in place that rewards skill and knowledge of enemy placement, of knowing what's about to come up and how to defeat it, to abuse all the combat options available to you in order to rank up the highest score. To ignore it in favour of simply completing the list of levels in
Vanquish is to ignore what is so compelling about the game. Other inclusions, like the game's risk/reward melee attack that completely drains your shield and leaves you open to damage at the price of dealing massive attack damage, tie into the respective power ups of shoot 'em ups. Even the simple idea of weapon data being stored inside of Sam's suit and transforming the gun in his hands into various different shapes is analogous to the weapon switching in shoot 'em ups where little weapons and doodads hover around your ship, waiting to be used in the battle.
This is all relatively meaningless to the experience in
Vanquish, but I couldn't help but see a curious connection between a genre I typically don't enjoy and the otherwise traditional elements of a third-person shooter. I wouldn't say
Vanquish is an exact rendition of the mechanics of a bullet hell shooter inside of a shooter but the influence is definitely there, and it adds a much needed burst of speed to an otherwise slow moving genre. In an industry where there isn't an awful lot of permutation and differences between titles,
Vanquish sounds out as unique experience. I don't want a sequel for it, I just want to see that same driving enthusiasm in other games to reinvent the simple act of avoiding attacks.
