‘Vanquish’ thrills

“Vanquish” may seem like just another of the legions of third-person action games in which your character shoots enemies from behind crates, clocks them with special melee attacks and can summon slow motion every once in a while. The difference is that “Vanquish” is directed by Shinji Mikami, the man whose genius was glimpsed in the 16-bit “Aladdin,” strongly suggested when he created “Resident Evil” and affirmed for the ages with the release of “Resident Evil 4.” For his first game since leaving the Capcom umbrella, Mikami has left behind the trappings of horror to focus on straight-up arcade-style action, but still in a world that rivals “Resident Evil’s” for pure cheese. In “Vanquish’s” vision of the future, the planet isn’t ruled by some omnipotent U.N. successor, but is effectively divided between Russia and everybody else. One day Russia, because it’s Russia, destroys San Francisco with a beam shot down from a satellite, and the U.S. president sends up a soldier named Robert Burns, who recites very little Scots poetry but has been training with a prototype combat suit that just might be the key to kocking the Ruskies back to Earth.

Not only can the suit replicate any weapon it scans, from a shotgun to a launcher of wildly ricocheting plasma discs, it lets Burns perform all sorts of moves, from wall-destroying punches to a spectacular dash that lets him skid across great distances like he’s sliding for home against the Russian baseball team. Doing these moves, along with entering slow motion, depletes the suit’s energy meter, which refills slowly over time. This mechanic lets the game avoid the tired system of earning special moves by repeating attack combos over and over, and gives the game a certain rhythm as you determine when to unleash which moves.

The action takes place in locales that are not terrestrial but not quite in outer space, so it feels at any time like your character could slip and go flying into the void. Unfortunately, the master of third-person action has ditched the camera system that made “Resident Evil 4” so distinctive. Instead of locking the camera over your character’s shoulder, which puts you close to the action, Mikami has adapted the standard system of controlling the camera freely with the right joystick — a recipe for disorientation, headaches and, well, feeling more like every other game out there than “Vanquish’s” core mechanics deserve.