Vanquish PC's improved framerate actually increases enemy damage

Vanquish on PC is harder than you remember, assuming you've got a good enough kit to bump up its framerate.

It's not the simple matter that you can't rely on slowdown for those micro-second moments of mental mustering, but rather that the enemies actually deal more damage with the boosted framerate.

As captured in the following gifs of the tutorial by NeoGAF user Wesker, the same projectiles actually hit harder with the framerate locked at 60 than they do on 30.

"If you lock the framerate to 30 fps AR mode [a slow-mo feature that kicks in when you're low on health] will activate after six-seven seconds of taking enemy fire but if you're playing at a higher framerate, like 60 fps, it will activate in just one-two seconds."

Wesker added that "this can be consistently reproduced."

It's worth noting how many times Sam gets shot and staggers. It's hard to keep track of all the lasers pelting Sam in the 30 fps gif, but he appears to be shot upwards of nine times and he staggers five times.

Comparatively, in the 60 fps gif he's only shot about six times and staggers once before his AR failsafe initiates.

In both clips he's shot with the same types of projectiles.

So what's going on here? It's hard to say exactly, but there is a precedent for game mechanics being tied to framerate - like when Dark Souls 2 launched on PC and weapons degraded twice as quickly with the spruced up framerate (a bug that was later fixed in a patch).

When asked about this peculiar change, Digital Foundry's John Linneman told me this "would not surprise me one bit considering it probably was never intended to run at higher frame-rates."

That said, he noted that "it's a subtle enough thing that I didn't notice it. I suspect you'd have to be very familiar and skilled to pick up on it."

Aside from this quirk, we found Vanquish's PC port to be the definitive version of Platinum's perennial classic. "The Vanquish experience has been elevated to the next level," Linneman said in his Digital Foundry tech analysis. "A genuine last-gen classic is enhanced in genuinely transformative ways on PC and we highly recommend you check it out."