Depth, Mastery, and Vanquish

PlatinumGames is best known for fast, theatrical action games: Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising, The Wonderful 101, and other games built around stylish combat. Vanquish looks like the odd one out. It was directed by Resident Evil 4 designer Shinji Mikami, and at first glance it seems closer to Gears of War than to a brawler.

It is a cover-based shooter, which usually suggests a very different rhythm: hunker down, peek out, take shots, and move carefully from wall to wall. But Vanquish still belongs in the same design family as Platinum's most celebrated work, because the important shared trait is not punching, kicking, or sword-slashing. It is depth and mastery.

Great action games can be played on multiple levels. A novice can stumble through and enjoy the spectacle. A more engaged player can start combining mechanics and making smarter decisions. A master can discover techniques the tutorial never explains and turn the same basic toolset into something expressive, fast, and almost unrecognizable.

At the first level are learners. These players may mash buttons, brute-force combat encounters, ignore half the systems, die often, and finish fights in a way that looks awkward. A good action game still gives them a good time. They might earn poor scores, but they should not feel as if the game refuses to let them in.

That accessibility matters. A game that only serves the people who already understand its deepest systems risks becoming niche. The surface level has to be readable and exciting enough that a new player can enjoy the game before they understand why it is special.

In Vanquish, the shooter equivalent of button-mashing is playing it like a conventional cover shooter. You can crouch behind walls, take pot shots at enemies, and use Sam Gideon's rocket slide mostly as a fast way to get between pieces of cover. You may trigger AR Mode, the slow-motion state, from time to time, but it feels risky: activating it can leave you exposed, and draining the suit's energy makes you overheat.

That version of Vanquish works. It is not the most interesting version, and it certainly is not the most stylish, but it lets learners survive long enough to enjoy the absurd speed, explosions, and spectacle around them.

At the second level, learners become players. This is where the depth starts to appear. In this context, depth is the ability to get more from a basic set of mechanics through combination, timing, positioning, and decision-making. It lets players express themselves without the game needing to keep adding new abilities.

That distinction matters. Adding more mechanics, weapons, modes, or unlocks creates breadth. Depth comes when the mechanics already in the player's hands can be used in richer ways. Bayonetta can punch and kick, but different sequences of those inputs, sometimes with carefully timed pauses, produce new and more powerful attacks. Metal Gear Rising lets the player enter blade mode at any time, but using it with a full meter against an injured enemy can trigger a devastating Zandatsu move.

Vanquish translates that same idea into shooter language. Good timing lets you unleash AR Mode during rolls and jumps. Rocket sliding can be combined with slow motion, or with melee attacks. Positioning starts to matter because the slide can send you behind enemies instead of merely toward the next wall.

As those systems begin to overlap, the suit's heat becomes more than a cooldown meter. Sliding and AR Mode both push the suit toward overheating, so every attack has to include an escape plan. You are constantly shifting tempo between attack and defense, trying to deal damage on the knife edge of shutdown.

At this level, cover is no longer the main way to play. It becomes a temporary respite. Sam Gideon's abilities stop feeling like isolated actions and start becoming a chain of moves that can be combined for dramatic effect.

At the third level, players become masters. The deepest action games contain techniques and strategies that are not fully explained in tutorials. They emerge from the exact rules of the systems and reward players who experiment, study, and practice.

Bayonetta has dodge offset, a high-level technique that lets skilled players dodge during a combo without losing the combo's place. Vanquish has its own discoveries. One of the most important is boost-dodging. The rocket slide does not begin overheating the suit during its first split second, so an expert can immediately cancel it into a dodge, cover huge distance, stay almost invulnerable, and avoid overheating.

Other techniques turn small rule details into speed. You can reload faster by switching away from a weapon and back during the reload animation. You can speed up the firing of a slow weapon like the rocket launcher by switching to it while another gun is firing. You can distract enemies by tossing a cigarette. You can shoot grenades in mid-air during slow motion for massive splash damage.

None of this requires a new upgrade tree. These are advanced applications of mechanics the player had from the start. The difference is knowledge, timing, dexterity, and the skill to execute under pressure.

The main campaign encourages the second level of depth. Vanquish throws enemies at you with weak points on their backs, pushing you to combine rocket sliding, slow motion, and a retreat path. It asks you to shoot rockets out of the air in AR Mode. It invites you to slide under giant boss monsters instead of merely circling them from cover.

Mastery, however, needs stronger tests. That often means brutal difficulty settings, expert challenges, and scoring systems. Vanquish has its God Hard mode and its challenge missions, but its scoring system is where the design stumbles.

The best action-game scoring systems are complex but readable. They help players understand what the game values and point them toward better play. A medal, grade, combo score, or clear breakdown can turn an end-of-level result into practical feedback.

Vanquish mostly gives the player a number. It appears to account for enemies killed, headshots, time taken, and amount of cover used, but the system is difficult to read. The result does not clearly explain what went well, what dragged the score down, or which advanced strategies deserve to be practiced next.

Scores matter because they can teach and motivate, but players also master games for a more intrinsic reason: they want to look and feel amazing while playing. The difference between a novice Vanquish player and an expert is immediately visible. One is surviving behind cover. The other is sliding through danger, triggering slow motion, canceling moves, reloading instantly, and ending encounters with style.

That visible transformation is why deep action games can seem intimidating from the outside. When a designer says the first playthrough of a game is almost like a tutorial and that the real game begins on the second pass, the experience can sound cold or hostile to newcomers.

The trick is to make the first layer generous enough that newcomers still have a good time. Wild animations, ridiculous set pieces, and straightforward surface play can carry learners through. Then the deeper systems reward the people who decide to keep learning.

Vanquish is useful because it proves that this style of depth is not limited to brawlers. Letting players express themselves through interlocking moves can work in a shooter too.

It also works in other genres. Project Gotham Racing can be played as another racing game, but its kudos system creates depth around special maneuvers. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater becomes extraordinary when a player learns to combine grabs, reverts, manuals, flip tricks, and grinds into one enormous combo.

Depth may also be crucial to long-lasting multiplayer games. They need to be approachable for new players, but a high skill ceiling gives advanced players reasons to keep playing for years. Fighting games are the obvious example, but the same principle appears in Rocket League and even Call of Duty.

A reload cancel in Call of Duty might look like a bug or exploit at first. If the player can sprint halfway through a reload animation to skip the end and get back into the fight, that sounds accidental. But when the timing has risk, requires dexterity, and has survived because it makes high-level play richer, it starts to feel like an advanced strategy.

Depth comes from mechanics that let players make interesting decisions, express themselves, or play with more speed and style by discovering advanced applications of the same core tools. It can appear as air combos and dodge offsets, rocket slides and reload cancels, racing maneuvers and trick chains.

The result is a game where the more you put in, the more you get out. Vanquish may wear the costume of a cover shooter, but its best moments come from the action-game promise beneath that surface: simple tools, risky combinations, hidden techniques, and a mastery curve that makes the player feel more powerful because they actually became better.