It’s hard not to be a little in love with Platinum Games, the studio behind Vanquish. Ever since they were known as Capcom’s Clover Studio, its developers have blazed a uniquely goofy, hardcore trail with amazing underdog games like Viewtiful Joe and Okami and, more recently, MadWorld and Bayonetta. We can’t say if Vanquish — a high-speed shooter that plays like Gears of War on pure adrenaline — will be the game that finally catapults Platinum into mainstream success. But it sure as hell deserves to be.

A bright, beautiful, cover-centric action game filled with ruined scenery and cool things to shoot, Vanquish stuffs you into the experimental body armor of would-be super-soldier Sam Gideon, then hurls you face-first into the shattered remains of an immense space colony that’s been overrun by Russian robots. With a backdrop that mashes together the testosterone-fueled grit of Gears with the gleaming space battles of sci-fi anime, it’s your job to gun down the robot hordes before the colony’s massive microwave beam can boil New York City from orbit.

Naturally, this means spending a lot of your time ducking behind convenient cover points and trading shots with everything from rank-and-file drones and snipers to drill-armed hulks, creepy trash-monsters, and massive walking cannons with big, glowing weak points. It’s standard third-person-shooter stuff, but what makes Vanquish special is that it somehow manages to avoid the traps of repetition and boredom to which so many other shooters fall prey.

There’s almost always something new happening around you. One minute, you’re fighting a pitched uphill battle against machine-gun turrets and huge, robot-piloted walkers (which you can hijack for temporary near-invincibility) as huge spaceships crash into the ground around you. The next, you’re desperately trying to keep your superfast monorail train from smashing into a parallel, gravity-defying one that’s bursting with enemies. Then you’re escorting a floodlight-equipped APC through a creepy, pitch-black tunnel filled with giant walking bombs. And all of what we just described happens in the first few levels; from there, it only gets more insane.

You do have a couple of unique advantages to help you survive all the craziness, the first being an upgradable nanotech firearm that lets you choose between three different forms at a time. These include standard shooter arms — shotguns, (surprisingly powerful) assault rifles, rocket launchers — but you’ll also find more exotic weaponry, like an unwieldy disc launcher that can sever enemy limbs or act as a close-quarters chainsaw. And every weapon feels finely tuned and powerful, ensuring that you’ll have fun no matter what you’re carrying.

The second, bigger advantage is Sam’s experimental armor. Light, nimble, and equipped with a miniature reactor, it not only soaks up damage, but also enables you to rocket-slide (which helps you quickly reach cover, blaze past bad guys, or just roar around for fun) and smash foes with lightning-fast punches. It can even heighten Sam’s senses to the point where he enters bullet time, an effect triggered either manually or automatically when you’re near death (making this one of the few games where you might welcome getting wounded).

The catch is that your armor can do this stuff for only so long before it overheats, at which point you’ll be powered-down and vulnerable for several crucial seconds while you wait for the reactor to vent. That’s a big drag — especially since landing a single successful punch instantly overheats the armor — but it’s an acceptable trade-off for being able to rocket-slide around on your knees like some sort of action-movie badass, machine-gunning robots in slow motion.

Even when Vanquish isn’t continually lobbing new things at you, the stuff it does hit you with is almost always big and loud and interesting, as you race rapidly from one epic set-piece to the next, never slowing down enough for the action to turn into a slog. In short, it’s everything a game should be: relentlessly engaging, relentlessly fun, and relentlessly challenging without ever being frustrating. The inevitable downside is that it’s short, taking around six to eight hours to complete, with only a handful of Horde mode–like single-player-only challenge missions to lure you back in once you’re through. While it lasts, though, Vanquish is one hell of a ride.

On Xbox 360

+ Breathless pace and streamlined design ensure you'll never get bored.

+ Suit and weapon abilities are a lot of fun to experiment with.

- Waiting for the suit to cool down is a bummer.

? Why does landing one punch instantly overheat the suit?

9.0