Uncharted: Golden Abyss Review

And here it is. Uncharted: Golden Abyss. I know we're a little late on the train here but bear with us, we just got the PlayStation Vita.

First off, I was really impressed with this game. I liked it a lot. That being said, there are some pretty big criticisms for this handheld version of a console franchise. Especially since a lot of time is spent getting the player used to handling this game on the Vita and utilizing all the "super cool" features contained within.

You know what that means? Tutorial menus! Tutorial menus everywhere!!!

Okay not everywhere but you get the idea. The start of the game looks like this every five freaking seconds and it gets on your nerves. Granted, they have to show you how to do things with the Vita's features since they're pretty out there, but no one wants to have these things shoved in their face.

Vita Gameplay

 So what do you do with the Vita's bright and shiny features? Well I'll tell you. Using the touch screen you can map out Drake's path while he climbs for more steamlined movement. This is pretty useful, and damn nice to have since it gets a little clumsy with the analogue sticks and the buttons. Want him to jump from gap to gap while hanging? Oh, just tilt your Vita in the direction he needs to lean and hit jump and he'll do it. Swinging on a rope or a chain? Just tilt the Vita again forwards or backwards.

From little puzzles, to charcoal rubbings and even making sure Nathan stays balanced on logs or stone columns, you use the Vita in a pretty versatile manner throughout the adventure.


There are other areas where you have to stroke and push the back touch pad of the PS Vita to rotate objects and dust them off, and holy hell is that sensitive. I mean, seriously, if you push to hard or pull too hard it literally flies around like it's in a washing machine.



Then there's the rope climbing. So the game tells you that if you want you have the option to use the rear touch pad to make Drake climb the rope up or down. Effectively, you stroke the backside of your PS Vita to do so. Yeah, let that image sit in your head with that wording. Here's the funny bit. If you do this effectively, you get a Trophy for making Drake successfully climb up a rope using the touch pad. They reward you for making him climb up a rope. It's like they knew this was a bullsh*t feature and wanted to give you a pat on the back for doing something they knew was a freaking chore. If you don't feel inclined to lovingly stroke your PS Vita, you can just use the control stick. It is pretty hilarious that you can bypass the whole process.

However, there is some good stuff when using the movement capabilities of the Vita. You sometimes have to take pictures to solve mysteries in the game so you actually use the screen like a digital camera and can move around physically like you are part of the world to get a better angle and shot of what you're looking at. You can also do this when sniping. One thing I really liked was when Drake was trying to solve something on a piece of paper, it told me to hold the system up to a bright light source and the paper I was looking at in game looked as if I was holding it to the light and I could see phantom letters showing through the paper. It was pretty boss.


Overall Gameplay


Aside from all the gimmicky Vita stuff, the game plays pretty much like a normal Uncharted game. Movement is a little janky and slow, and the small screen size does make it a little difficult to see where you're going or where you're supposed to go. The AI of the partners is passable at best. They hold their own in a fight but as soon as they stop taking cover they will either get directly in your way when trying to go somewhere, or just run far ahead of you for no apparent reason.


The enemy AI, however, is really good. They flank, take cover and toss grenades like seasoned mercenaries and army vets, which they are, coincidentally. Frankly, the combat is really good in this game, it is just difficult to aim down the sights since the screen is, again, pretty small. Don't get me wrong, the Vita has a nice screen, but it doesn't exactly lend itself to this kind of detail-oriented gameplay.

There are these pretty dope little scripted events that you have to do with the Vita that normally you'd do with a button sequence, but they make you do them with the touch screen instead. Those work out really well, are pretty easy to do and add a little interactivity to the game that is full of just shoulder button pushing and jumping.


As always, there are puzzles, mysteries to solve and things to collect. If you're a completionist, then this is heaven for you. If not, they don't add anything to the game and you can pretty much breeze through it in a good amount of time. I played the game on Normal (as I usually do for reviews), and I beat it in a good amount of time. I want to save over 12 hours of straight gaming. For a handheld, I suppose that's pretty good.


There's also this Black Market attachment to the game where the bad guys drop some collectables when they die and if you collect them all...you get a Trophy I guess? I mean, it's just something else to do. You can trade with other players through Near and the Playstation Network, but other than that it's a pretty useless function.


Score 

Overall the game is great. The voice-acting is top notch (as we've come to expect), the story is solid, the music is amazing, the gameplay is fun and it is anything but boring. One thing I have to say is that the graphics are great on this. I mean really. They're pretty phenomenal for a handheld. One thing that's kind of funny is that everybody looks like they have way too many teeth in their mouth. Kind of a Miley Cyrus issue goin' on there.

I can't help but feel that this game just doesn't belong on a handheld. I could not play this on the go. I could not play this anywhere else other than sitting down and focusing on it intently because it is a game you have to be invested in. I mean, all of the Uncharted games are like this. Why would this one be any different?

Fans of the franchise will enjoy this as a side-story to the overall arc of Drake's adventures that have been on the console, but I honestly think that it being a handheld game sort of hurts it. I think that's why it was so short too. They sort of attempted to make it palatable for the people who would want to play this while going places, but really they just kind of made a shorter version of a longer and more involved game. To be fair, though, if this was ported to the console? It would be stellar. No question about it. I don't think I found any bugs while playing this and the most trouble I had was trying to figure out where to go, futzing around with the unrefined Vita mechanics and struggling with the fixed camera in some of the cinematic escape missions.

Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a solid 9/10. It loses points for the buggy Vita features, but its saved by the quality of the overall game. If it lacked good dialogue, good gameplay, or was just difficult to play, I would say this would be a poor shadow of a great property. But since it is just as enjoyable as its bigger siblings, I would highly recommend this game to anyone with a Vita who enjoys the Uncharted series as a whole.


P.S. Fans...all of these screenshots were taken on my Vita while playing. I just thought that you should know you could do that with a Vita and marvel at the quality of the in-game images. That is all.

Checking out the PS Vita

Well, I got to try out the PS Vita this Friday. This was an interesting event for me since this device is already available in its country of origin and reviews and news of its sales have already permeated the web. That being said, I had to approach this review in a very different fashion than I normally would. Knowing that there needed to be some improvements, that it was already a fully operational system (much like the Death Star) and that it had more games slotted for release than the 3DS did, I needed to pay extra close attention.



The setting for the event was nice, the Hill Club in Los Angeles, a pretty swank little place that was completely cleared out except for some real soft couches and chairs and low lighting. Honestly, I’m not sure what the purpose for this was other than hiding the freaking PS Vita from my eyes because the thing is black and it was nearly invisible in the non-existent lighting.

The first thing I tried out was Reality Fighters. Gotta say, it was pretty fun. I mean I never played anything with an “Augment Reality” feature on it (don’t have a 3DS), so I got to mess around with that. The front facing camera for that game is used to take a picture of the player and put their mug on the little virtual fighter, the rear facing cam is used to place your fighters somewhere in your immediate environment for them to duke it out. Or you can just use the stages given to you in the game and totally bypass that whole situation. Regardless of which one you choose, you have to move the camera (and by camera I mean the entire freaking handheld) to keep your fighters in frame if they move around too much.

That was a little irritating to me because it felt like I was holding the console awkwardly and it wasn’t too conducive to playing. The graphics on the game were pretty nice, I’ll give it that, but it felt like I was looking at enlarged HD models from Shogun: Total War 2 that had been put on the bodies of the Street Fighter characters so they could fight. That description basically sums up Reality Fighters for you. It was fun, there were a lot of unlockables, and the story was cute. It’s perfect for playing on a bus or a road-trip or what have you, but it’s just another fighting game. When they have Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 coming out for the PS Vita, it makes me wonder if Reality Fighters is just to show off the “augment reality” thing. A novelty game if you will.

Next I tried some weird little racing game they had. It honestly looked like a really fancy version of Hydro Thunder (you know, that awesome boat racing game you always played in a movie theater or restaurant?) but without water and more like F-Zero. Similarities aside it was pretty bland but that game was there to demonstrate the Vita’s ability to play on the PlayStation Network with PS3’s on multiplayer. This is a really cool idea to me and if it works? Hooboy. That changes a lot of things for the better.

I watched a couple of ladies play competitively, one girl on the Vita and the other on the PS3 there and they said they worked fine in tandem and they weren’t experiencing any problems. Say you’re playing on a bus against someone who is at home playing the same game online and you race together (or play UMvC3 or whatever you wanna say) and you two are having a grand old time. You get the multiplayer experience of just playing with someone online, and I’m fairly certain there’s a voice feature that lets you chat with the other person through your PS Vita too. So that, in my mind, is pretty awesome.

This assumes though that you’re going somewhere or are at an outside location with a good connection to the internet or good wireless signal to keep from lagging, and won’t look like a total basket case while shouting at your PS Vita. You then run the risk of making anyone with a mobile gaming platform look like those wackos who yell at people over their Bluetooths or make people think they’re shouting at them while they ride the bus together (someone please do this because I will pay money to watch that happen).

The other game of note that showed off the Vita’s capabilities was Little Deviants. It was a cool little mini-game extravaganza that made you utilize all of the features on the handheld. Honestly though, my least favorite feature is probably the rear touch pad. I feel like it’s a little pointless. There is a pad on the back of the Vita, the size of the screen on the front, for you to use for…what? Games? Apps? I’m not exactly sure what other purpose it could have other than gaming, but there you go. There seem to be a lot of features on the Vita that are multi-purposed and that one seems to be the only one that has only one job. Maybe I just wasn’t able to try it out enough, but I digress.

Little Deviants was actually really fun. You got to move the Vita around to roll the little monster dudes across a field, or guide him through caves to search for bombs dropped by funky robots. You used the front touch screen and rear touch pad to play this sort of Whack-a-Mole game where you had to knock robots out of windows with the touch screen/pad depending on which way the robot was facing. The weirdest game was the one where I had to pinch the screen (I had to place my fingers on the front screen and touch pad with my hand over the top of the Vita, like I was picking it up that way) and use that position to slingshot the monster guy across the arena. That got a little cumbersome and clumsy and wasn’t the best game on there.

As a system, the PS Vita is a jack-of-all--trades. It has WiFi multiplayer capability, you can surf the web on it, you can play really good looking games on it that are super fun, but I think it suffers from one fatal flaw. The games on the PS Vita show what the developers think you can do on your journey or wherever you are that is not in front of your PS3. Little Deviants and Reality Fighters depend on you riding on a bus or in a waiting room or outside for a bit and having enough time to play a few matches or a couple of mini games. Uncharted and the many other rpgs that are slotted for launch require lots of concentration and time to play, so you better be on a long ride or someplace where you can really play without someone shouting “PUT THAT DAMN THING DOWN AND GO VISIT WITH YOUR GRANDMOTHER!”

For its price, $250, you’re better off just buying the PS3 and spending some cash on fun games for your smart phone. Don’t have a smart phone or DS or anything like that? Maybe you should just listen to music, read a book or…I dunno, talk to people. I mean, the PS Vita is cool and has a lot of potential but it’s a lot of money to spend on something you may get only an hour, at most, of use out of it before you put it down. How long do you want to spend looking at that small screen? How often are you on a plane, a train, or an automobile for extended amounts of time? What can it do that your smart phone, laptop, or mp3 player can’t? Play games? Do you have to play games every second of every day wherever you go? If you answered “yes,” then the PS Vita is for you and you might like it a whole heck of a lot. If you can live without it, then I guess you save $250 and can use that on something else.