1. I am always skeptical when game companies farm their handheld titles to other developers. In the case of Uncharted: Golden Abyss is was Naughty Dog handing their cinematic game franchise to a first party Sony studio. I figured this was a bit more akin to Capcom developing Zelda for Game Boy than Ubisoft throwing their IPs to whatever garbage studio handles their pocketable translations so I thought I'd give it a go.
2. The goal with Golden Abyss seems to be pretty clearly to show off the capabilities of the Vita by bringing a huge AAA franchise to it in style. For what it's worth, they sure did wind up w/ an Uncharted game on the Vita but it's a "good enough" type effort if I've ever seen one.
3. This was a launch title by a first party studio so the developers were compelled to throw every possible new control method at the player, mostly in the form of touchscreen mini games. This is fine enough, I guess, but if I really wanted to rub every possible inch of my Vita screen, I'd grab a cloth and clean it for once.
4. Otherwise, it controls pretty much like any third person shooter. You run around, aim, shoot, climb ropes. All the things. You can use the touchscreen to draw a path to follow when scaling walls but this is mostly useless. Additionally, common combat controls are mapped to the touchscreen and accidentally throwing a grenade at your own feet when you are trying to engage in melee combat adds an exciting wrinkle to action sequences.
5. The setup here is you are Indiana Jones recast as a huge dumbass. You play as treasure hunter, Nathan Drake, a man tough enough to navigate caves overrun w/ people trying to kill him, smart enough to know everything about archeology and yet still enough of a dupe he can get tricked by people a child wouldn't trust.
6. In case you were wondering, no, Golden Abyss is not a clever name for the empty void that divides the hearts of those who seek fortune above all else. It is a literally an abyss w/ a lot of gold in it. Nobody seems to have put more thought about it than that.
7. Gameplay has three components: shooting, climbing and doing absolutely nothing. All of these are equally engaging. I am willing to admit though that the pacing between these is really good if a bit overly scripted for my tastes. Just when you get sick of endless waves of enemies, you get a relaxing section where you follow the exactly one path to your next destination where you then spend five minutes watching a cut scene before you repeat this process.
8. Though you have no real choice in how you go about achieving the game's objectives, there is a good deal of side content to explore along the way. Mostly, if you run into a place where you must pick between going the obvious right or obvious wrong way, you need to go the wrong way first to pick up some collectable. The reward for this is often a touchscreen mini-game so once you pass one or two collectables you can't double back and get, you realize you will never 100% the game on the first playthrough and get to avoid that tiresome nonsense for the remainder of your playtime.
9. Holy smokes are the enemies in this ever bullet sponges. I dunno... I feel like a couple shots to the chest should take down a guy who is obviously not wearing body armor. I mean not you. You are special. You can get shot like a hundred times and duck behind a short wall for thirty seconds to return to full health. That's fine. I just don't want to stand there and have to unload a full magazine into every bro that comes at me. Putting so many holes into human beings just gets dull after a while.
10. And, yeah, the headcount in this game is something close to incredible. It's like watching every Rambo movie but the first one in order three times in a row.You are in a supposedly unexplored ancient ruin and yet somehow you run into mobs packed thick at every corner. Thankfully, they spent a couple hours before you got there littering the place w/ guns and ammo. I am pretty sure Golden Abyss does not take itself totally seriously but this is a bit much.
11. Combat never gets harder. It just gets more annoying from time to time. There is a super overpowered sniper rifle that's really fun to use though so it all balances out.
12. There is a point where you feel like you're about to start wrapping everything up and you are like, "Well, short but sweet but at least it never got super repetitive and boring." This point is approximately one third of the way through the game.
13. I'm not going to lie, though this isn't really my style of game and it seems like I'm going pretty hard on it, I did actually enjoy playing it for the most part. It is not exactly good by my excruciating standards of high drama and gameplay excellence but it fills time well enough and every time I picked it up, I'd find myself playing it for much longer than I expected. The story is pretty obvious but good enough to string you along. There's a bit of mystery, a bit of romance, some witty banter. Uncharted: Golden Abyss pretty much puts you in the same fugue state as binge watching a pretty decent show. Your mind isn't really turned on but you're not bored and you can drink beer and eat popcorn if you want. It all works out.
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