Computer says no.
Platinum Games’ Vanquish launched in Europe yesterday to a range of mostly positive reviews, including a glowing 9/10 score from Eurogamer. However, comments from a lukewarm Game Informer write-up stating that Vanquish could be completed in under four hours have raised alarm for many players, along with incredulity from Platinum Games’ writer JP Kellams.
In an age where games are still expensive enough to be considered investments rather than impulse buys, does Vanquish offer enough to warrant its price-tag? Digital Foundry decided to put this to the test. During the creation of our Face-Off coverage, I captured our entire playthrough of the game on Xbox 360 – a mammoth 1.29TB of lossless 720p60 game footage, and subsequent to the feature’s completion I rounded off my playthrough of the PlayStation 3 game.
While Vanquish maintains its own in-game timers that measure progress as you move from level to level, by stitching together all of the captures into one enormous video, we can time exactly how long it took to complete the game. The result? Eight hours, 47 minutes. However, my completion stats were rather poor. I died many, many times: 54 to be precise, although admittedly many of them were down to one particular boss with an extremely annoying one-touch kill attack. Regardless, the completion stats made it clear that there was still much to learn in mastering this game… which is perhaps the whole point.