Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

In the spirit of all those other games whose names are all in capitals, Sega has brought a demo for the upcoming PlatinumGames (Viewtiful Joe, Okami, MadWorld, Bayonetta) title VANQUISH to PSN and XBLA. It launched today, so I played it.

I’d like to point out that VANQUISH was completely off my radar before this. I’m a fan of PlatinumGames and everything those folks did when their name was Clover as well, but somehow I had totally overlooked this title.

VANQUISH is a third person shooter with some melee stuff in it. Think of Too Human, but without any of the mythology, and with battle suits and a lot more intense action. There’s some similarity to Lost Planet as well, with the hijacking of walkers in the game. The demo lets you play one stage from the full game in your choice of two difficulties, casual auto or normal.

Casual auto difficulty was my choice for my first try, and it was an interesting concept. The auto refers to the aiming. Point the camera in the general direction and hold L1, and Sam locks onto a target. Keep holding L1 to stay locked, and hold R1 to shoot. When the target goes down, he’ll snap to another nearby target.

This made the demo pretty much a breeze, especially when coupled with the cover system. Get behind cover, lock on, and hold fire. You’re given a few different weapons to swap between while fighting using the d-pad, and there are more to try in the tutorial (which is also available in this demo). I recommend taking a spin through that before tackling the provided stage, because there’s a lot here you won’t get, like the bullet-time AR Mode, which gives you a chance to make a comeback or escape for a few seconds just as your life is running out, or whenever you like with an annoying button combination (run, hold X, then L1). This runs until your suit overheats.

I enjoyed the demo. It has some similarities in feel and style to some of Shinji Mikami’s other work, like Devil May Cry and even PN03. The weapons are fun to use and everything feels very fast paced. In casual mode, it’s easy to take out enemies and progress if you’d rather not face too heavy a challenge, which was nice. Bullets feel a little scarce at times, but nowhere near as bad as in Lost Planet 2 or Transformers: War for Cybertron. The final boss of the demo stage, Argus, is cool looking, hulking and difficult, with multiple points to attack and even a form change in the middle of the fight.

I’m expecting a review copy of the game to come in, so when that shows up I’ll be back with more.