Outlast: Over-hyped and Overrated

If you believe the hype, Outlast is the scariest game to hit the market since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In case you somehow missed it, Amnesia is the game that basically set the new standard for horror games back in 2010. I was extremely impressed with Amnesia when I played it and still consider it one of the best horror games ever made. Outlast takes a lot of lessons from Amnesia, and indeed it even feels a lot like Amnesia (which is perhaps reason enough to play it), but unfortunately my high hopes were dashed by what turned out to be a simplistic, repetitive survival experience. Instead of being the new heralded champion of horror games, Outlast feels more like a merely "average" horror game.

The game begins with you as Miles Upshur driving up to the front gate of the Mount Massive Asylum. You're a journalist who received an anonymous tip warning of illegal activities at the psychiatric hospital; you're there to document evidence and expose the story. The only thing you bring with you is a battery-powered video recorder, capable of recording in complete darkness thanks to night vision. In the beginning, Outlast seems to get the formula right, with this introduction sequence emphasizing a slow, atmospheric build-up before your adventure descends into madness. It's calm, creepy, and foreboding with the lightest sprinkling of jump scares to keep you wary of what you might encounter up ahead.

Immersion is the key in any survival-horror game, and Outlast weaves a very plausible, organic feeling into its gameplay and presentation. The entire game is in first-person, and your physical presence in the environment feels incredibly tangible thanks to the inclusion of a full body model that you see any time you look around or interact with things. It adds that extra little bit to the experience when you open a door and see your hand reach out for the knob, or when you peer around a corner and see your hands gripping the wall, or when you look down and see your feet stepping onto and over the junk that litters the floor. This is all in addition to the breaths, heartbeats, grunts, and other such noises subconsciously reminding you that your character is an actual person -- corporeal and vulnerable.

Peering around a corner

Further immersing you in the game is the plausible feeling of its setting. Whereas many horror games have you dealing with paranormal and other-worldly horrors, the horrors in Outlast are rooted much more in reality. Being set in an asylum means any horrors you face are distinctly human, albeit often grotesque and twisted. The horrors, therefore, flirt with the uncanny valley -- the realm where familiar, ordinary things all seem slightly weird -- which can make the creepiness factor hit that much closer to home. It just adds to the immersion and your feeling of vulnerability when you realize that everything you're seeing could in fact be a real scenario.

When it comes to horror games, I have a much better appreciation for games that can make me feel uneasy with creepy atmospheric stuff, rather than overt jump scares, and Outlast pulls off the "creepy" side rather well in its early stages. At one point I entered a small office storeroom with a dangling fluorescent light fixture, and of course there are bloody corpses at the desk on the other side of the room. When I approached the bodies, the light in the room started spazzing out, casting shadows along the wall. Caught off guard, I turned in place only to realize that I had bumped the light with my head and was in no danger whatsoever. It says a lot for the game's atmosphere, pacing, and tension that a little moment like that was able to spook me.

That goddamn light

Meanwhile, most of the inmates you encounter are harmless, rather preferring to go about their own psychotic business than to murder you. Each of these encounters is unsettling because you never know which ones are going to lash at out you suddenly. You enter a room and inmates are adamantly staring at the static on a television screen; one roams around hitting his head against various spots on the wall; another done up in a straight-jacket slowly follows you. Others are more lucid, talking to you about what they've experienced and warning you of what's going on, while others ramble and rant incoherently. Other saner inmates seemingly want you dead and stalk you throughout the asylum.

Early on you reach a wing of padded cells that looks very much like a prison. In this area, you encounter two inmates on the other side of a set of locked bars, calmly talking to each other about who you are and how they're going to kill you. They vow you give you a running start. As you try to navigate the wings and halls of the asylum, those two guys keep showing up, just out of reach, always watching what you're doing, commenting on your actions, and talking to themselves. Their presence feels much like Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2 -- they're not much of a threat at first, but their presence is incredibly foreboding and makes you sincerely worry that something bad is going to happen.

Don't mind me, I was just leaving

Eventually you encounter armed inmates who want to kill you, with certain enemies continually reappearing throughout the game. Given that you have no weapons at your disposal, your only option in these encounters is to run and hide, a mechanic that has worked successfully in a number of other survival-horror games. It works just as well in Outlast, at least at first -- having to hide from enemies instead of defeating them outright makes you feel more vulnerable and creates some tense moments where you're looking through slats in a locker, listening to the enemy prowling in search of you, hoping he doesn't come to check the locker you're in. This works well enough at the start, but before long it begins to take away from the experience.

The whole "run and hide" mechanic just doesn't work very well in this game because the suspension of disbelief is just not there. This is a game in which your enemies are ordinary humans (psychotic, but human nonetheless) -- they talk in coherent sentences and have seemingly full kinesthetic control of their bodies. If you're hiding in a locker, they can effortlessly handle the latch and open the door with complete ease, but if you close a wooden door behind you while they're in pursuit, they have to stop for five seconds to break it down. As I played I thought to myself: "so you're telling me these guys can open a locker door and kick my ass like it's no problem, but they become utterly stumped when faced with an unlocked wooden door?"

Furthermore, I had numerous occasions where an enemy was chasing me down a hallway; I turned into a room and closed the door behind me, then got into one of two lockers. The enemy stopped for a moment to break down the door then began searching the room. He opened the locker next to me, saw that I wasn't there, then left the room without bothering to check the only other hiding place in the room. And my jaw dropped to the floor in disbelief. These guys aren't bumbling monsters; they're lucid, coherent-speaking human beings that just happen to have a violent psychopathy. I don't buy that just because they're inmates in an asylum, they don't have the common sense to know that I couldn't have left the room and must be in the only other possible hiding place.

Homoerotic necrophilia. Silky.

These two aspects of their behavior (getting stuck when faced with a wooden door, and not thoroughly checking a room before giving up) just don't make any contextual sense. Both aspects are absolutely necessary for the sake of the gameplay -- you have to be able to slow an enemy down otherwise you'll never actually be able to lose them, and they can't search every single hiding spot in a room because then you'd never be able to hide -- but it utterly breaks the suspension of disbelief when you realize the inconsistencies in their behavior. The whole act of surviving thus ends up feeling trivial and artificial. And it gets repetitive, too -- after a while you realize it's just same situation over and over again, and you sigh and grumble when that one enemy predictably shows up for the fourth or fifth time.

Perhaps even more egregious is that you have regenerating health. In most cases you can take a few hits before dying, but if you go a few seconds without taking damage (via hiding or running away) you'll be back at full health, meaning you're rarely in any risk of actually dying. Even when you're cornered in a hallway, you can sprint past the enemy, take a hit, and be basically unharmed until you find a way to ditch him. With only two player-states in the game -- alive or dead -- there are only two outcomes to any encounter -- you survive or you die. You don't have to worry about surviving an encounter but being left low on health, so you therefore don't feel vulnerable because you quite literally cannot be harmed, which makes enemies feel more like a temporary nuisance than any actual threat.

You look like you've seen a ghost.

Later on you're faced with enemies that kill you in one hit, thus negating the whole "regenerating health" mechanic, but rather than making the situation more tense, it only serves to deflate all the tension by reducing the gameplay to a tedious matter of trial-and-error as you try to figure out what to do or where to go. That situation ceases to be scary when you're facing it a second, third, or fourth time, and when you know exactly what to expect and are just looking for the solution. These enemies just feel like a tedious obstacle. As much as I hate the regenerating health, at least surviving a hit gives you a few seconds of near-death tension; with enemies that one-shot you, there's no feeling of being close to death, and being killed ends up feeling utterly anti-climactic.

Besides collecting evidence and hiding from enemies, there's not much to actually do in Outlast. For the most part, you just follow an inexplicably linear path through the asylum, waiting for the next "thing" to occur. There are no puzzles to solve and there's no inventory management. The only limited resource you have to worry about is the battery supply that powers your camera's nightvision, but these are abundantly available and you can spend the entire game sitting on a max supply of batteries. There's very little feeling of problem-solving to be had in this game, so for all intents and purposes, you may as well just be on a haunted ride at an amusement park.

The game's overwhelming linearity becomes increasingly wearisome when it becomes apparent that all you're ever actually doing is encountering locked doors and then searching for a key via the only other available path. Outlast really likes to tease you with a way out, of finally finding a way to the next area, only for something to happen suddenly to block your path, requiring an arbitrary "lock and key puzzle" to get around it, and that gets to be incredibly soul-crushing after the fourth or fifth time it's pulled this trick on you. It's especially disappointing that the most sophisticated the game ever gets in this regard is when you have to press three buttons spread out across multiple different rooms, which is itself not a very engaging task; otherwise, you're literally just looking for one key to one locked door.

Prepare to see a lot of this

Part of the reason Amnesia was so successful was that it featured numerous adventure-style puzzles that required you to collect inventory items and use them in the environment. Amnesia presented you with a blocked path and had more creative solutions than just "find the key" or "press the button to restart the generator." It required problem-solving and gave you productive things to do in the environment besides just mindlessly going forward. There's nothing like this in Outlast, and that I feel is a woeful omission because much of the gameplay experience in Outlast feels so passive and inconsequential.

That's not to say that Outlast is all bad, though. Some of its most crucial elements are ultimately flawed and detract from the experience, but there's still enough to enjoy in Outlast. The atmosphere and sense of immersion it creates is really good (when it's not undermining itself with inane enemy AI or repetitive stealth sections), and it has a pretty good grasp on creating creepy, unsettling scares and spooks without relying on excessive jump scares. Certain areas are distinctly memorable (the prison wings, going outside) and offer a fairly original experience you likely won't find in other games. But it could have benefited greatly from more sophisticated objectives, slightly more thought-provoking puzzles, less forced linearity, and better stealth mechanics. 

Ain't No Rest For the Wicked - Killzone: Mercenary

The PlayStation Vita is a pretty powerful piece of technology capable of delivering console-quality gameplay. With its dual joysticks, large screen, and impressive graphics processor, the Vita seemed poised to become the first handheld to deliver a proper first-person shooter experience. And yet in the system's 20 months on the market there have been fairly few FPS games, most of which have been received by gamers with a decisive yawn of indifference. Enter: Killzone: Mercenary.

Killzone: Mercenary is the FPS that Vita owners have been waiting for ever since the system's launch back in February 2012. It's been a while since I played a console FPS and I've never played any of the other games in the Killzone series, so I can't vouch for how well it holds up to any current console shooters or the Killzone series, but Mercenary is leaps and bounds above any FPS I've ever played on a handheld. Even compared to what I've come to expect from "typical console shooters" (imagine me saying that as disdainfully as possible), Mercenary managed not to piss me off and actually impressed me a little bit.

As the game's subtitle suggests, you play a mercenary taking contracts from the highest bidder in the middle of the Helghast-ISA war. Initially you take contracts with the ISA to extract one of their admirals from Helghast capture, and later to sabotage a Helghast colonel's cruiser. After these two missions, the rest of the game is a string of missions revolving around a Vektan ambassador's son, who apparently holds the key to a deadly virus that could be used to kill an entire planet's population. Both sides want the virus, but it's in your best interest to do whatever pays best.

Unfortunately, as I'd expect from these types of games, there's zero player choice in the matter -- you're forcibly strung along in the story, forced to take your hands off the controls in first-person cutscenes and to do as you're told by whomever happens to be in charge at the current moment. This ranges from your mercenary captain, to the ISA admiral, to the Helghast colonel depending on the situation, but after one betrayal and switching sides, you inexplicably start taking orders from a "neutral third party" late in the game, and when presented with a decision of what to do with the virus, you just watch the cutscene. 

Floating objective message says to hack the terminal

It should be noted that throughout the game you play a silent protagonist, Arran Danner. In most circumstances, being a silent protagonist is fine and helps the player assume the role of the main character, but I really felt like Mercenary could've benefited from giving Arran Danner some sort of vocal presence. There's a certain part in the game, for instance, when you're on your own and that neutral third party comes over your radio giving you objectives and telling you what to do to survive; I would have preferred for Danner to fend for himself in this instance, because it kind of takes away from the experience when you just mindlessly go forward listening to the voice in your ear, because Danner has no agency of his own. Likewise, it would've been nice to be more in control of some of the decision-making, in particular when it comes to what to do with the virus. 

But this is a first-person shooter and all that really matters is the action, and that element at least proves rather solid. Mercenary takes a mission-based approach to its gameplay; rather than having everything as one continually-flowing narrative, the game is broken into nine contracts (ie, missions). Each one begins from the main menu as you select the contract, visit the arms dealer to purchase any equipment you might want for the mission, and selecting your difficulty. You're then dropped into the mission and play through to completion, at which point you arrive back at the menu and select the next mission. Alternatively, you can go back to previous missions and select optional sub-contracts to complete each mission with different goals.

Each of the nine missions has three different sub-contracts named "Precision," "Covert," and "Demolition." In each case, the point is to provide the same mission but with different goals and slightly different objectives. The "Precision" contracts are typically about efficiency, wanting you to get in and get out quickly while getting efficient kills; the "Covert" contracts are typically about stealth, getting through a mission without being detected; and the "Demolition" contracts are typically about being as destructive as possible. Each sub-contract also requires you to use certain weapons or pieces of equipment.

Aiming down the sights in a firefight

A large part of the respect I hold for Mercenary derives from this idea of sub-contracts. Not too long ago I wrote an article about how I miss "Rareware difficulties" -- difficulty systems implemented in Rare's GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, in which playing on progressively higher difficulties added extra objectives and opened up new areas of each mission on top of simply making the combat harder. Those games offered a lot of replay value and encouraged you to get better and gain mastery, because playing on a higher difficulty offered a new experience. When playing on a higher difficulty in most modern shooters, all it does is boost the enemy damage output while lowering your own, which generally doesn't encourage me to replay a game.

Mercenary can be played in three different combat difficulties, but these can be selected independently of the sub-contracts, so even if you want to play the sub-contracts for the extra replay value, you can do so on the easy mode. When compared to the likes of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, the subcontracts in Mercenary are actually quite superficial; they don't add any new content to the missions, and in general most of the objectives pertain to playing the mission a different way. In that sense, it's a little disappointing that they don't actually change the missions that much, but considering I haven't seen anything like this in years, it's hard to complain. I found myself more than happy to go back and try to complete the "Covert" contracts just for the challenge.

The other thing I really like about Mercenary is that the missions aren't totally linear, corridor-crawling fests. Each mission has a generally linear path from objective to objective, but they frequently consist of open spaces with different obstacles and structures, where you can sneak around to flank enemies or take unconventional approaches to the objective. If you look around, you can usually find multiple different paths through a given area, whether that's going through the front door or climbing up a pole and approaching from the roof, or taking a zipline across an area. It's just nice that each mission gives you a little bit of freedom to explore and decide how you want to do things, rather than being forced down a completely linear path with completely scripted encounters.

Using the carapace shield in combat

The other way in which Mercenary promotes creative approaches is with the arms dealer. Completing objectives, contracts, and scoring kills grants you cash rewards which you can spend with the arms dealer, Blackjack, at designated caches during missions and in-between missions, customizing your loadout. You're able to carry one primary weapon, one secondary weapon, one type of grenade, one set of armor, and one type of Van-Guard system. You can choose between 12 primary weapons, 12 secondaries, five grenades, six armors, and eight Van-Guard technologies. Certain loadouts are better suited for certain situations, but for the most part this system just lets you customize your playstyle.

The weapons are all your fairly standard shotgun, pistol, assault rifle, submachine gun, sniper rifle, grenade launcher, and rocket launcher variants, but where the game adds more unique elements is in the Van-Guard system. The Van-Guard skills let you deploy a piece of advanced technology, based on a cool-down cycle. The one I ended up using most often was the Ghost, which cloaked you for a limited time. Others include a front-facing ballistic shield, a shoulder-mounting homing missile system, a remote controlled stealth drone, an electronics jammer that blocks enemy radar and communications, and so on. Like the weapons, the Van-Guards are there for the extra variety and to promote different playstyles, which is always a welcome feature in a shooter.

In terms of the controls, Mercenary controls just as you'd expect for a dual stick FPS. The shorter sticks on the Vita don't offer as great a range of movement as the sticks on the PS3 or Xbox controller, but that's a minor adjustment that should come naturally to most gamers. In fact, I'd say the controls on the Vita are actually better than using a traditional controller for the simple inclusion of tilt aiming. With tilt aiming enabled, you're able to tilt the Vita forward or backward, left or right to make small adjustments to your aim while looking down the sights. I've never been that much of a sharpshooter with dual sticks, much preferring the feel of keyboard and mouse controls in my shooters, and typically get destroyed in local multiplayer matches on the consoles, but found it so much easier to make a quick, accurate adjustment to my aim by tilting the device than trying to move the stick slightly, and was soon rattling off headshots and running-and-gunning with efficiency. 

Swiping across the screen to perform a melee kill

The game also implements various touchscreen controls, primarily allowing you to navigate menus by tapping on the screen. Other functions are accessed by icons along the sides of the screen, easily within range of your thumbs while in a heated fight; you can switch weapons or deploy your Van-Guard by tapping an on-screen icon. Other elements of the touchscreen don't integrate with ordinary gameplay as well, however, and come off feeling forced and awkward. Whenever you get close enough to melee an enemy, for example, you end up watching a short first-person cutscene and swipe across the screen in a quick-time-event to execute the kill. There are times when you approach a switch, press triangle (the action button), and watch as your arm comes out to activate the switch, only for the game to suddenly lock up with a swipe icon across the screen. That particular action absolutely does not require the extra input and is completely jarring. 

Other than that, I don't feel like there's much else I can really say. Killzone: Mercenary is basically your standard FPS experience, for better or for worse. The AI seems decently competent; not terribly advanced but not terribly stupid either. The action is decently enjoyable, with satisfying stealth approaches or intense in-your-face gunfights depending on how you want to play each mission. The one thing I'll say about that, though, is that the game features auto-regenerating health, a mechanic I wish would go away. The regenerating health basically ensures that there's a ton of room for error in run-and-gun gameplay, because no matter how overwhelming the situation might be, you just duck behind cover for a few seconds and you're fine, but there's virtually no room for error in stealth -- one poorly-timed assassination or one unexpected change in a guard's patrol route, and every alarm gets tripped. 

It should also go without saying that the graphics are damn impressive. This is the best-looking game I've ever seen on a handheld device, and it comes awfully close to what I'd expect to see on a PS3. If you look closely enough, you can see where they cut corners to make it work on the technically-inferior Vita hardware, but the simple fact is this game looks amazing and exceeds expectations. I hate to say it, but the graphics really contribute a lot to this game's authentic console-quality feeling. 

If you own a Vita, Killzone: Mercenary should definitely be on your list of games to play. Even if you don't have a Vita, this might be the killer app to convince you to buy one. If nothing else, KZ:M has demonstrated how sophisticated a first-person shooter can be on the Vita, and hopefully that means we'll be seeing more shooters of this caliber in the future. Oh, and as usual with first-person shooters like this, there's an online multiplayer which I refuse to play, so don't expect any of that in this review. 

Dazed and Confused: Gravity Rush

A young girl wakes up in the gutters of Hekseville, a towering city in the sky, with no memory of her past or her own identity. Accompanied by a black, star-speckled cat, she's immediately thrust into action to save the life of a young boy whose house is being ripped from the city structure by a gravity storm. It's then that she becomes aware of her powers -- or rather, those of the cat who follows her -- to shift gravity. With this ability she runs along walls and even flies through the sky, but despite rescuing the boy, she's unable to save the house, and is met with contempt by the townsfolk who still look down on her and her kind; gravity shifters.

Gravity Rush, a PlayStation Vita exclusive (and one of the most compelling reasons to own a Vita), tells the story of Kat and her gravity-shifting companion Dusty as she attempts to adjust to life in Hekseville while putting her superpowers to good use. Initially, this means finding a place to live and furnishing it, but she quickly becomes a key figure in fending off the monstrous "nevi" afflicting the city, and in restoring sections of the town lost to the gravity storms. It's basically a superhero origin story with lots of deep, subtle storytelling and tons of mind-bending, gravity-altering physics bent around platforming, combat, and exploration.

In a market saturated by sequels and franchise spin-offs, it's always refreshing to play a completely original game with its own unique identity. Gravity Rush is a solid new entry from Project Siren (makers of the Siren series), but as with basically all new games, there are a few kinks holding it back from reaching its full potential. It's a diamond in the rough -- fun to play and pretty to witness, but rough nonetheless.

The majority of gameplay takes place in the city streets of Hekseville, which serves as your basic hub for the game. Like many sandbox games, you're free to roam about and do your own things, like talking to NPCs, picking up side-quests, completing optional challenges, and collecting gems to upgrade your abilities. Every so often, though, you're forced to advance the story by taking on a main mission. Many of these take place within the confines of the city, but the more interesting ones take place in rift planes -- ethereal realms that link different dimensions of spacetime.

Controlling gravity in outer space.

Your overarching goal is to restore the lost parts of the town by freeing them from gravity storms, with each lost district featuring its own self-contained "level" within the rift planes. The whole game feels kind of like a Mario game, except obviously dressed up in a completely different skin; you wander the hub city and choose missions that send you into uniquely themed areas (one modeled after a ruined city, another a fiery inferno, another a cosmic space theme) that emphasize exploration, platforming, and item collecting. This is where the gameplay really shines, with each rift plane offering unique ways to play with gravity, along with concrete goals to accomplish as you progress towards a final boss fight.

In the rift planes, you navigate a mostly linear course from beginning to end. Along the way you have to use your gravity powers to navigate the course (or sometimes due to plot reasons, you're left without your powers and have to rely on basic jumping and moving platforms), which sometimes function a little like a puzzle. At other times, you have to stop and fight a series of enemies to advance to the next area. All the while you're free to venture off the beaten path a little to explore for gems, to find special hidden powers, and to face rare nevi sub-bosses. While the actual gameplay feels reminiscent of a Mario game, the premise of each rift plane in the greater context makes it feel kind of like going into a dungeon in a Zelda game.

The hub city Hekseville is full of its own splendor and enjoyment as well. Hekseville is itself a majestic sight to behold, with its quasi-steampunk architecture jutting into the sky and its detailed infrastructure. Should you venture underneath the city, you're treated to an equally beautiful-in-its-griminess depiction of the city's industrial underbelly and supporting system. The visual design mixed with some wonderfully inspired music makes traversing the city a whimsical pleasure in its own right, but the gravity system also promotes a lot of fun and rewarding exploration. Littered about Hekseville are precious gems, the currency used to upgrade your abilities; I was pleased at how often I'd jump off the side of the city and find a wealth of gems hidden along support beams, since the gravity control lets you reach all kinds of places you'd never reach in other games.

Just hanging out in Hekseville

But as marvelous as the city is to behold, the whole thing unfortunately comes up feeling hollow and lifeless because of how little interactivity there actually is within this world. It presents you with this rather large city with hundreds of people roaming its streets, and yet you can only talk to three or four NPCs that are marked on your map. There are houses and buildings all over the place, and yet you can't set foot in any of them. There are shops set up on the streets, and yet you can't buy anything from them. There's hardly anything to actually do in this place besides collecting gems and completing optional challenges.

When entering a new chapter (by completing a main mission), gameplay is basically as follows: you open your map to see what new icons have popped up for NPCs with whom you can talk, or pieces of the city that you can repair by spending gems. You then click on the icon to set up a waypoint and then zoom past everything to get to the waypoint, because literally nothing in-between actually matters. Whenever you repair a part of the city, you unlock a challenge that dumps you into an isolated instance with varying goals (defeat as many nevi within the time limit, race to the finish line as fast as possible); this is the most substantial thing for you to do in the game besides hunting for gems and going through main missions, and yet they feel wholly out of place and basically unnecessary.

The challenges are there seemingly just to provide a challenge (hence the name) for completionists striving for bragging rights and trophies (ie, achievements). The problem is they don't feel very well-integrated with the gamespace because they're separate from everything else and break the game's continuity when you enter one. Other than that, it's basically impossible to achieve a gold medal in any of them until you've upgraded all of your abilities -- in other words, they're impossibly challenging when you first unlock them, and then a complete breeze if you wait and just come back to them later. And yet, the gems they award you are basically useless since you can acquire more than enough gems to max out all of your skills just by exploring the world, which I found much more enjoyable anyway.

Grabbing and throwing objects as per the challenge

So Gravity Rush is a game that doesn't really give you many ways in which to interact with its world, and yet it also rarely ever lets go of your hand. From the constant waypoint markers to the constant tutorial messages all telling you exactly what to do, even reminding you how to do things it already told you a few hours ago, my experience with Gravity Rush left me begging to be let go to do things on my own. At one point you're given a quest from a fortune teller to follow a set of obscure clues to a destination, and yet the game pops waypoint markers telling you exactly where to go while Kat figures out the interpretation, rather than letting you figure out the puzzle for yourself. At one point you're sent to flip a switch somewhere, and when you approach the device you don't even get to press a button to flip the switch -- the screen fades out and back in with a sound effect, further exemplifying the relative lack of interactivity in this game.

Besides that, the game tends to over-emphasize its combat, which proves ultimately dull and repetitive.The town is besieged by gravity storms, which bring with them monstrous foes known as the nevi. The nevi take on various forms throughout the game, ranging from simple, small blobs that crawl along the ground to huge, flying insect-like creatures. The game gives you various ways to fight enemies, including basic grounded kicks, roll dodges, sliding kicks, aerial kicks, objecting flinging, and various special attacks, but throughout most of the game you're forced into situations where your only option is to gravity kick targets because you can't reach them with a regular kick, or because there aren't any objects around to throw at your targets.

A somewhat tedious boss battle exemplifying the monotonous combat

It's all the same basic strategy no matter what enemy you're fighting, since literally every enemy has the same weakness. Every single nevi has one or more red spherical cores that protrude somewhere from its body, and for every single nevi, defeating them is just a matter of hitting each core enough for it to break. So for every single enemy in every single fight, you just target the core. Factor in that many enemies leave you no choice but to use the gravity kick, which sends you flying across the screen like a bullet towards your target, wherein you simply point and click to execute your attack, and you have a combat system that proves really simplistic and repetitive. It got to a point where I simply dreaded fighting more enemies just because of how monotonous it had become.

What makes Gravity Rush worth playing, though, is the simple fun to be had from controlling gravity. By pressing the R button you become weightless and float in the air. From here, you can aim anywhere you want, press R again, and go flying to that surface. If you aim at a wall, your feet will gravitate to the wall and you'll be able to run along it. If you jump off the side of the building, you'll start falling parallel to the ground, because your gravity is still oriented sideways, until you land on the side of another building or press R to shift back into weightlessness. Or you can just fly through the city like Superman (Supergirl?) by changing velocity with the R button.

There are two very important things that make gravity shifting so much fun. First of all is that it's easy to control; the beginning of the game serves as an introduction to the story and world while also being a tutorial for the various game mechanics. The tutorial does a fine job of teaching you how things work and letting you get the hang of everything so that by the time you're done you're ready to fling yourself all over town with impeccable accuracy and control. Second is that the camera does a pretty good job of keeping up with your rapid movement. With the frequent shifts in orientation, it'd be all too easy for the gameplay to become a disorienting, bumbling mess, but the camera adjusts fluidly to the changes and was usually good about pointing the way I expected. Failing that, you can press down on the plus pad to revert the camera back to a standard "up is up" orientation.

Gravity sliding in the Inferno rift plane.

Words can't do the flying or gravity shifting sufficient justice. It just feels so natural in this game, and it offers a whole lot of freedom for creative exploration (going underneath the city, flying over rooftops, etc). Earlier in this review I mentioned being disappointed by how little there is to do when you're just roaming about the city between missions, but flying around the city is so much fun that you almost don't even notice in actual gameplay.

The bulk of the game is controlled with the two joysticks, with the left dominating movement and the right dominating camera control; the four face buttons are used for basic actions like jump, attack, and so on. Where Gravity Rush throws in some unique twists is with the touchscreen; by pressing and holding both edges of the screen, you can make Kat slide forward along the ground at high speeds. By tilting the device, you can make her turn; removing one thumb from the touchscreen makes her drift mid-turn. You can also tilt the device to aim yourself during gravity shifts. As gimmicky as it would seem to add touch and motion controls to a third-person action-adventure game like this, they feel pretty good and add quite a bit to the game's appeal.

The story, meanwhile, is fairly engaging to follow and offers a lot of subtle depth, depending on far you want to dig. If you really pay attention, you might notice that a lot of seemingly trivial and incidental comments are actually connected to things you discover later, and it's the sort of game that can make you ask a lot of questions. The questions aren't always answered, unfortunately, leaving many elements of the game's backstory and lore open to interpretation, but as with any good game, it's the sort of subject matter that can make you think, while making it clear that there's more to the lore than just what you see on the surface. It's just disappointing that the game's final stretch comes off feeling so anti-climactic, and that the game ends so abruptly with zero resolution after the final boss fight.

Kat as she gains consciousness at the start of the game.

Kat is a likable protagonist -- ambitious and enthusiastic with the plausible character flaw of sometimes being a little naive -- but her characterization wavers at a few points in the story. For starters, she doesn't seem concerned at all about her amnesia and just contentedly goes along with everything, which made accepting her as a character a bit jarring at first. Then later, after being established as a strong, independent young woman coming to terms with her powers, she begins to mope inexplicably about not having a boyfriend and fawns over the prospect of meeting a handsome guy. That moment of emotional weakness came out of nowhere and seemed to conflict with her established personality.

With Gravity Rush being my first experience playing a Vita-exclusive game, I can't say how well it stacks up to other Vita games. Glancing over the library of available and upcoming games, it's clear that Gravity Rush is a must-have for any Vita owner; it's fun, it's engaging, and it offers a fairly unique experience in a completely original, upstart game series that you simply can't find elsewhere. But it's not without its problems, and its announced sequel could benefit from a few crucial refinements. If you don't own a Vita and are looking for the killer app to justify the investment, Gravity Rush is probably not it, but it's a satisfying experience nonetheless. 

It's a Jungle Out There: Tokyo Jungle

Tokyo Jungle has quite the unique premise -- after humankind has mysteriously gone extinct in Tokyo, the urban city has become a sprawling jungle for animal wildlife. You play as an animal attempting to survive in this jungle, scavenging for food, defending yourself against bigger and stronger animals, claiming territories, and reproducing. When I bought the game ($14.99 on PSN), I was expecting a slow-paced, realistic survival simulator with a unique twist -- that would've been such an awesome gameplay experience. But it turns out that Tokyo Jungle is a much faster-paced, arcade-style roguelike. Not what I was hoping for, but the game is still surprisingly addicting.

Tokyo Jungle consists of two gameplay modes -- "Story" and "Survival." In story mode, you play specific scenarios with certain objectives that tell a loose story arc for different animals. The story mode, however, is not the game's main emphasis; it's survival mode. The entire game is built around survival mode, with the story missions consisting of derivative survival mode mechanics forced into certain situations. In fact, you can't even play the story missions until you've unlocked them in survival mode. The story missions and unlockable story logs are a welcome component, offering a little more depth and insight to the backstory of what happened leading up to the current situation, but if you're looking for something more than a survival roguelike, you should probably look elsewhere.

In survival mode, you get to select which animal you'll play as, and you're given as long as you can survive to play. Initially, you can choose between a Pomeranian dog (a small carnivore) and a Sika deer (a mid-sized herbivore). As a carnivore, you'll have to hunt other animals in order to eat; as an herbivore, you'll have to avoid carnivores and forage for plants and fruits growing about the city. The two types of animals provide slightly different gameplay experiences -- carnivores get to play a more action-style game with a combat system, and herbivores get to play a more stealth-style game, sneaking through tall grass and avoiding enemies.