Gamesugar

Sony held their annual Holiday preview event in Toronto this week, spreading this year’s wishlist for the PlayStation set around the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. A few titles that won’t be making it to shelves before 2011 were in attendance, such as Killzone 3 and LittleBigPlanet2, but the primary focus was on releases vying for your wallet before the end of 2010.

A quick tour around the building managed to reunite me with Vanquish, which meant a glimpse at a stage not available in the earlier released demo, which in turn gave me something new to think about regarding the game before it hits shelves on October 19th.

Soaking up the greenery this particular stage offered, I’m still pretty impressed by just how much seems to be going on within the game at any given moment, which makes AR mode something increasingly significant despite my initial doubts.

AR mode – the ability to slow down time within the game – has been nagging at me, given how many games stick in that gimmick and simply overwhelm you with enemies to force its use. Slowing down time so I can shoot more enemies in the chest at once really isn’t all that exciting in the end. The first few play-throughs of the Vanquish demo can make that same impression, with it becoming a crutch simply to stay alive while learning the controls.

Checking out this latest bit of the game though, I watched as AR allowed my friendly neighborhood Sega Rep to target and shoot a missile as it was still leaving an enemy soldier’s rocket launcher, thus killing the enemy that much more efficiently.

What a lovely little detail that seemed to be as I wondered what else waited to be found.

The easy thing to say about Vanquish is that it’s a fast game. And when at an event and someone asks why they should go check it out, it’s doubly easy to say that the game is “something like Gears of War but fast” – but that isn’t it at all.

The thing about a fast game is that it doesn’t need to be very detailed, since it’s going by too damn fast for you to notice anyway. But every time I watch some new spot of Vanquish in slow motion, there seems to be plenty of new details emerging that would have been lost in the speed – so many more details to catch sight of and possibly exploit that you simply have to slow it down to take it all in.