Right,
So this potentially massive game for the vita has arrived finally, and after trying to keep optimistic about the final quality of this title, the truth is....it kind of sucks bad.
Where to start?
Well seeing as its my number one vita bugbear the visuals. Subnative/No AA/crap A.I/really crap excuse for a visual respresentation. Why on gods earth have sony made a machine with this resolution when 95% of the retail games dont even use every pixel, and still look ****. A first for a handheld surely outside of retro/emulated titles on psp etc.
On to the controls, and as soon as you fire up the combat training its just a bit of a nightmare from the get go. The dual analogue sticks are nowhere near up to scratch, if you thought aiming in uncharted was bad then dont even come here, seriously. Touch screen knifing feels completely wrong, though funnily enough frags felt ok. If like me you like to tackle cod in veteran mode, then please save your self the stress and strands of hair, because by virtue of the dire controls its just unfathomably difficult.
In terms of the story/levels/design etc, i've only played a few missions but its sorely lacking any (even faked) excitement in terms of decent set pieces, and levels are so dull and basic it makes the first basic level of something like doom seem like a masterpiece here in 2012. They should have gone with a real bang of an opener in mission one, instead you get such a dull intro into the game, and things havent really improved a few missions in either....although i have only played 4 of them so far. It may take a while to update this, because they are so tedious. If you hate the way cod is like walk to set piece> wait> kill some guys>next set piece> rinse and repeat, then forget this game, because its that drastically shortened, and devoid of any excitement at all.
The multiplayer side of things so far is a complete disaster. As i sit here typing i have spent the last 45 minutes trying to connect to a game, the closest a came was getting into the map loading screen once, and right when the game was about to start it kicked me back to the menu for the 100th time... i kid you not. Then to make matters worse when you try and start another game by clicking on "multiplayer" it gives you a blank screen and you cannot return to the main menu at all, you just sit like a plumb until you shut the game down and restart it, holding out each time through the tedious loading screens etc. To have to relaunch the game every time you crash upon multiplayer error.....really sony/activision/nihilistic???
You know you are onto a **** dev when on day one they introduce a patch to implement something that should have always been part of the game from beta onwards, and the patch ruins the rest of the multiplayer. And the patch itself was 409mb.
I've never tried so hard for a **** 4v4 in my life, hell even the ps2 could handle more players in its also crappy port of rainbow six 3 years back, without any issues, and with visuals and level size that rival this. And here was me thinking that the vita was probably more powerful than the original xbox, forget the ps2....hang on let me check the specs a second, the xbox produced 16 player online games with better visuals, bigger levels etc and on paper was nowhere near as powerful?
Awful.
This kind of game could be considered a landmark for all the wrong reasons, "the hump that broke the camels back" if you will.
The best part? the menu music that is idential to black ops.
And the only thing that made me smile? the ?44.99 price tag on psn. Oh sony bless you, its like you have two divisions working against each other. One team comes up with PS+ on vita as fantastic money saving deal, the other makes deals with publishers to create games this ****, and champion the use of sub-native ****-o-vision.
Anyway, try at your own risk.
EDIT(going off the topic of this game): What this kind of game and other just recently have really tought me personally, is that the biggest failings of the vita have come at the cost of cheap skating on sony's part each and every time. Sub native trending most probably comes from cutting the vita gfx memory prior to release, and sub native was an easy/cheap way to get the already mostly developed games out quick, rather than properly optimising games for the memory cut. I mean can you imagine how amazing the likes of uncharted would have been at native res? and AC3? the mind boggles. They would change from being good looking but strangely dull/muddy, to genuine pick your mouths off the floor games, and in turn system sellers like COD2 was on xbox360 back in 2005....and who could forget seeing that on those samsung HDTV's in game and thinking "holy ****"!?
Cut down ports to some extent could be down to the game size cap, which brings me nicely onto the loading times of many vita games. If sony are going to give us old gen SD card tech, then at least give us decent sized cards for our money, but oh no they had to be greedy both ways, old tech and shady memory sizes for top dollar. Meaning crappy game size caps, and infuriatingly long loading times in quite a few games(though i hear ragnorok is decent in this regard).
Sorry guys this has veered off into a vita rant, but i'm a nats bollock away from tarding this machine in as much as i love certain things, its a painful waste of fantastic tech.
So this potentially massive game for the vita has arrived finally, and after trying to keep optimistic about the final quality of this title, the truth is....it kind of sucks bad.
Where to start?
Well seeing as its my number one vita bugbear the visuals. Subnative/No AA/crap A.I/really crap excuse for a visual respresentation. Why on gods earth have sony made a machine with this resolution when 95% of the retail games dont even use every pixel, and still look ****. A first for a handheld surely outside of retro/emulated titles on psp etc.
On to the controls, and as soon as you fire up the combat training its just a bit of a nightmare from the get go. The dual analogue sticks are nowhere near up to scratch, if you thought aiming in uncharted was bad then dont even come here, seriously. Touch screen knifing feels completely wrong, though funnily enough frags felt ok. If like me you like to tackle cod in veteran mode, then please save your self the stress and strands of hair, because by virtue of the dire controls its just unfathomably difficult.
In terms of the story/levels/design etc, i've only played a few missions but its sorely lacking any (even faked) excitement in terms of decent set pieces, and levels are so dull and basic it makes the first basic level of something like doom seem like a masterpiece here in 2012. They should have gone with a real bang of an opener in mission one, instead you get such a dull intro into the game, and things havent really improved a few missions in either....although i have only played 4 of them so far. It may take a while to update this, because they are so tedious. If you hate the way cod is like walk to set piece> wait> kill some guys>next set piece> rinse and repeat, then forget this game, because its that drastically shortened, and devoid of any excitement at all.
The multiplayer side of things so far is a complete disaster. As i sit here typing i have spent the last 45 minutes trying to connect to a game, the closest a came was getting into the map loading screen once, and right when the game was about to start it kicked me back to the menu for the 100th time... i kid you not. Then to make matters worse when you try and start another game by clicking on "multiplayer" it gives you a blank screen and you cannot return to the main menu at all, you just sit like a plumb until you shut the game down and restart it, holding out each time through the tedious loading screens etc. To have to relaunch the game every time you crash upon multiplayer error.....really sony/activision/nihilistic???
You know you are onto a **** dev when on day one they introduce a patch to implement something that should have always been part of the game from beta onwards, and the patch ruins the rest of the multiplayer. And the patch itself was 409mb.
I've never tried so hard for a **** 4v4 in my life, hell even the ps2 could handle more players in its also crappy port of rainbow six 3 years back, without any issues, and with visuals and level size that rival this. And here was me thinking that the vita was probably more powerful than the original xbox, forget the ps2....hang on let me check the specs a second, the xbox produced 16 player online games with better visuals, bigger levels etc and on paper was nowhere near as powerful?
Awful.
This kind of game could be considered a landmark for all the wrong reasons, "the hump that broke the camels back" if you will.
The best part? the menu music that is idential to black ops.
And the only thing that made me smile? the ?44.99 price tag on psn. Oh sony bless you, its like you have two divisions working against each other. One team comes up with PS+ on vita as fantastic money saving deal, the other makes deals with publishers to create games this ****, and champion the use of sub-native ****-o-vision.
Anyway, try at your own risk.
EDIT(going off the topic of this game): What this kind of game and other just recently have really tought me personally, is that the biggest failings of the vita have come at the cost of cheap skating on sony's part each and every time. Sub native trending most probably comes from cutting the vita gfx memory prior to release, and sub native was an easy/cheap way to get the already mostly developed games out quick, rather than properly optimising games for the memory cut. I mean can you imagine how amazing the likes of uncharted would have been at native res? and AC3? the mind boggles. They would change from being good looking but strangely dull/muddy, to genuine pick your mouths off the floor games, and in turn system sellers like COD2 was on xbox360 back in 2005....and who could forget seeing that on those samsung HDTV's in game and thinking "holy ****"!?
Cut down ports to some extent could be down to the game size cap, which brings me nicely onto the loading times of many vita games. If sony are going to give us old gen SD card tech, then at least give us decent sized cards for our money, but oh no they had to be greedy both ways, old tech and shady memory sizes for top dollar. Meaning crappy game size caps, and infuriatingly long loading times in quite a few games(though i hear ragnorok is decent in this regard).
Sorry guys this has veered off into a vita rant, but i'm a nats bollock away from tarding this machine in as much as i love certain things, its a painful waste of fantastic tech.
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