A Must-Have for Vita Owners
Here's an idea: Let's take a well loved franchise, renowned for its technical prowess, and hand it over to a different developer to build a launch title for an unproven handheld console. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Bend manage to do the Uncharted franchise justice in this Vita adventure.
Let's get this out of the way first: Golden Abyss is much closer to the low-key explore-and-discover Drake's Fortune than the bombastic, set-piece heavy Among Thieves or Drake's Deception. If you're hoping to see Drake achieve the impossible, escape collapsing buildings or falling airplanes, then you'll be sorely disappointed, as this Vita installment will take you on a tour through jungles, ruins and shanty villages and little else. But that's not to say this is Uncharted in name only. Visually, the game is stunning, aside from the minor blemishes of suboptimal image quality and noticeably low-resolution particle effects, and appropriately witty dialogue peppers the climbing and gunplay.
Set before the other games in the franchise, this Vita installment casts Drake and Sully with newcomer treasure hunters Marisa Chase and Jason Dante against the rebel militia of General Guerro in the search for the titular Golden Abyss, the lost city of gold of an ancient South American civilization. The story is well told, with its fair share of twists, tombs, and treasures, and for once manages to avoid the Indiana Jones-esque supernatural reveals that marred the previous titles. The developers seemed aware of the limitations the hardware imposed upon how much they could mix up combat encounters, and so there are a number of stretches without enemies. This might sound like a negative, but the exploration is enjoyable enough on its own that it comes across as having an appropriate level of restraint missing from some of the later console titles, giving you a breather between fights that helps prevent becoming fatigued from a seemingly endless stream of enemies.
Golden Abyss stays very true to its PS3 brethren in terms of gameplay, with its mix of ledge traversal and third-person cover-based shooting. Touch screen functionality comes into play in both of these systems. When climbing, you can tap a ledge you want to jump to next or trace out the entire route you want Nate to take, while in combat, tapping a nearby enemy will engage in hand-to-hand combat, both of which are viable alternatives to button controls, if neither are exactly necessary. Less useful is the ability to climb up or down ropes by rhythmically swiping either side of the rear touch pad in the appropriate direction, which is far less reliable than simply using the stick. Perhaps the best use of the touch screen is for throwing grenades, where you can touch and drag to aim where you want to throw without breaking cover.
Unfortunately, it's apparent that, as a launch title, the developers had been given a mandate to use all of the console's features extensively, giving parts of the game a gimmicky feel. Some of them are completely ignorable, such as the aforementioned alternatives to button inputs. Others are inoffensive enough, such as using either touch input to row a canoe, swiping the front to cut through overgrown bamboo, or rubbing the screen to simulate taking a charcoal rubbing of an ancient carving. Some are a little irritating, such as having to tilt the system to maintain balance on thin platforms, or having your aiming affected by motion controls, supposedly to allow for fine-tune aiming but in practice just making your aim jittery. Two boss fights in the game play out as extended QTEs using swipes, which is cheap albeit rather easy, but the most awkward and inconvenient is a mandatory puzzle requiring you to hold the rear camera up to a light source, which seemed very unreliable and is pretty disruptive compared to the rest of the game.
An interesting feature added into Golden Abyss is the Black Market. Alongside the usual collection of treasures hidden through the game (although now given more plot significance compared to those found in the console titles), enemies will randomly drop collectible items when killed. Using the Vita's Near functionality, you can then trade from your collection with other plays to try and complete the full set. Unfortunately, the only reward for doing so are a few trophies, and no one in my area seem to have an available trade, but it's an interesting concept nevertheless.
Gimmicks aside, Golden Abyss is a solid title that could conceivably have been a direct follow up to Drake's Fortune had Naughty Dog not opted to focus more on set-piece driven stories, and is certainly worthy of the Uncharted title.
