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Platinum's Vanquish rocketslides onto PC

Bumslide!

Hold onto your butts! If you don't, they'll fall off as you rocketslide around a spacecity kicking robots in Vanquish [official site]. Almost seven years after its console debut, the third-person shooter from Bayonetta and Nier: Automata devs PlatinumGames has finally arrived on PC. It is a good video game. Did I not mention that you can rocketslide and kick robots? Our Alec is bumsliding around to tell us all Wot He Thinks but, for now, here's notice that it's out and some brief tech thoughts.

I played Vanquish on Xbox 360 many years ago and having a rollocking good time. Sure, it can look like any post-Gears of War third-person cover shooter but that's a terrible way to play Vanquish. Instead, use your cybersuit to rocket around combat arenas, dip into slowmo, and kick robots right in their lousy faces. It has some slightly annoying bits and the story is guff -- in a boring way, not a fun one -- but it's good video games.

Alec will deliver a full opinion later but I did bug him for some thoughts on the technical side of things. He says:

"Runs smooth as Utterly Butterly here and keyboard and mouse controls are solid and logical. Awful high-end hardware users like me should be aware that even 8x edge antialiasing is lousy (FXAA looks much better) and you have to add "-unlockaspectratio" to the launch executable in Steam if you want ultrawide resolutions, and "-fov [yournumberofchoice]" to change the field of view. Only a one-time fiddle, fortunately. I should say that Vanquish inherently looks its age, however - it looks *fine* but don't expect miracles. Some textures especially can look like your kid just rubbed a lump of play-dough over your monitor."

Looks like Platinum are working with Little Stone Software on this PC release. They're the folks Sega previously brought in for the PC release of Valkyria Chronicles.

Vanquish is out for £14.99/19,99€/$19.99 on Steam. A data warning for mobile readers: that page has 54 megabytes of embedded GIFs.

As much as I dig Platinum action games like Nier: Automata and Metal Gear Rising, I would very much like to see them shake up shooting again. Another Vanquish seems unlikely, mind. Vanquish was the gamebaby of director Shinji Mikami, the Resident Evil 4 fella who went on to start his own studio after Vanquish and make The Evil Within.

Oh hey, here's a new video dev diary looking back at Vanquish:

Cover image for YouTube video

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In this article

Bayonetta

PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii U, PC, Nintendo Switch

NieR: Automata

PS4, Xbox One, PC

See 1 more

Vanquish

PS3, Xbox 360, PC

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About the Author
Alice O'Connor avatar

Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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