PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage is a man of impeccable taste, but I still hold a tiny grudge against him for not breaking the seal on PC Gamer's 98% review threshold to award Vanquish, the Xbox 360-era PlatinumGames shooter brought to PC in 2017, an unprecedented perfect score. "Beyond the laser-focused core loop, there isn't much to Vanquish. You start with knee-sliding acrobatics, and end the same way—around six or so hours later," Phil wrote in his 80% review when Vanquish arrived on PC. True enough, past Phil. But also: the Vanquish knee slide is the sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, followed closely by the second sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, in which at the press of a button Vanquish hero Sam Gideon pops off the helmet of his super suit, blasts a cig, and then flicks it away. There's an achievement for distracting robots with a cigarette before you shoot them. Only the Pope could do it better. I'm afraid the math is clearly on my side here: that's a 100/100 right there. On a superficial level, I've seen some chatter in the last couple weeks that Capcom's excellent Pragmata has a bit of a Vanquish vibe to it. I get the comparison, in that it's a pretty straightforward third-person shooter made by a Japanese developer, also starring a guy in a white astronaut-style space suit. You can do little jet-powered dashes in Pragmata, though nothing as prolonged or flashy as Sam's rocket knee slides in Vanquish. Having finished Pragmata, I don't think the two games are particularly similar in tone or pacing or even how the action feels in the hand—but I understand the comparisons anyway. Because what Pragmata reminds the Vanquish faithful of is the sensibility of all-killer-no-filler action games circa 2010. "We didn't know how good we had it," and that sort of thing. By recognizing Pragmata in 2026 for its earnest and unpretentious focus on shooting robots with one neat trick up its sleeve, we can right the wrongs of Vanquish and g