Uncharted: Golden Abyss Sucks Most of All

Given my history with the Uncharted series, I wasn't expecting great things from Bend Studios' Uncharted: Golden Abyss for the PlayStation Vita. I'd grown weary of the series after playing all three of the main installments back-to-back-to-back, but thought Golden Rainbow Golden Abyss might be a decent game to play on a mobile platform where my expectations might be a little more restrained, especially since it didn't cost me anything as a PlayStation Plus subscriber. It turns out even my modest "I'll enjoy it for what it is" attitude wasn't enough to prepare me for how utterly boring and disappointing Golden Abyss would turn out to be.

Thanks to the powerful graphical processing of the PlayStation Vita and its dual control sticks, Golden Abyss looks and feels very close to what you'd expect from the console games, but once you actually start playing it you begin to realize how streamlined and simplified the gameplay actually is. Like its elder brethren, gameplay in UC:GA basically consists of walking forward through linear paths, climbing and jumping across platforms, fighting tons of dudes, and watching cutscenes, but the gameplay is so pointless and unengaging that the only time it ever feels like you have any real control over the game is during combat.

Platforming, for instance, is totally without consequence -- there's virtually zero possibility of failure and Drake does virtually everything automatically. Often times you don't even need any sort of directional input to make a successful jump -- you simply press X and Drake jumps to the next platform automatically. Climbable ledges were always pretty obvious in the other games, but now they're made doubly obvious by the fact that they shimmer, an indication that you can use touch screen controls to make Drake climb an entire series of ledges by tracing the path of the ledges with your finger, in case you're too lazy to move the control stick and occasionally press the X button. 

Drake commenting on how lame the platforming is in this game.

Much of the gameplay seems developed around the Vita's unique hardware and control mechanisms, as if Sony wanted to use their flagship series to showcase all of the Vita's capabilities as a marketing tool, without ever considering if those controls or gameplay elements added anything worthwhile or wholesome to the experience. In each case, the Vita controls feel horrendously tacked-on and serve little to no purpose besides calling attention to the device you're playing the game on, which only serves to distract you from the game you're actually playing. 

Fortunately, most of the game can be played with the traditional control stick and button scheme, but you're often forced to take your hands off the controls and play a dumb finger-swiping mini-game to perform some trivial action like boosting your partner up onto a ledge or chopping down bamboo. The latter is particularly absurd when you consider that Drake has to stand there for several seconds methodically studying how he's going to cut the bamboo, rather than just doing it when you press the button. What's even more absurd is how much time you spend rubbing your finger all over the screen taking charcoal rubbings or wiping dirt off of tools and relics -- some of the most boring "gameplay" I've ever experienced in a video game. 

At one point you even have to use the rear camera, holding the Vita up to a light to make hidden text appear on a piece of parchment; that's a novel idea, but it completely disrupted my immersion by redirecting my attention from the game to my environment, and became especially problematic when none of the soft florescent lights at the airport were bright enough to pass the event. Whenever you cross a narrow beam Drake inevitably loses his balance so that you can play a Vita-tilting mini-game to regain his balance, which would be fine if not for the animation before the mini-game showing him catching his balance and standing perfectly still for a few seconds, just so that he can deliberately lose his balance in the mini-game. 

Drake's keen perception suggests a "Z" pattern is best for cutting down this particular bunch of bamboo.

The platforming sequences, in general, tend to feel gimmicky and unnecessary. On more than one occasion you're faced with a guy manning a 50 caliber machine gun and have to "find another way around" by climbing and shimmying along columns avoiding bullets, just so that you can flank the gunner and shoot him, when in reality it would be far simpler and easier to just run from cover to cover on the ground and chuck a grenade over the barricade. Making matters even worse is the fact that each action scene has some kind of idiosyncratic script you're supposed to follow, which completely kills the momentum when you try to perform a seemingly logical action and hit a metaphorical brick wall.

Everything is so tightly controlled and the game holds your hand so much that you rarely feel like you're actually in control. Combat is the only exception, since it's the one time in the game where you're free to choose where to go in each "arena," who to shoot, what weapons to use, and you're even free to get yourself killed if you're not good enough. Unfortunately, combat in itself isn't very satisfying because it often feels like a shooting gallery whop-a-mole -- ie, a simplistic, straightforward third-person cover shooter where you camp behind a chest-high wall and pop out periodically to shoot enemies as they stick their heads out from behind cover. Even then, many of the fights are ruined by the idiosyncratic script, which rigidly forces you to do certain sequences a certain way in order to progress. 

Level design is totally linear, which is no surprise given the series' track record, but the environments in UC:GA feel particularly cramped because of the relative limitations of the Vita hardware. In order to make the graphics look as good as they do, they had to cut back on the amount of stuff being processed, and thus we don't get any of the big environments or exciting setpieces the main series is known for. Exploration is virtually non-existent because of the tight, linear corridors, and the optional collectibles lie directly along the main path. The puzzles, what few exist in this game, aren't even that satisfying because they practically solve themselves.

At least the combat isn't total garbage like the rest of the gameplay.

As the fourth game in the series, Golden Abyss feels totally predictable because it does absolutely nothing to deviate from the already-wearisome formula repeated almost verbatim in all three of the previous games. Drake goes on a routine, harmless archaeological dig, meets a woman, gets double-crossed by his partner, realizes he's stumbled into something big, has the villain show up to steal the relic just as he finds it, and then has to race to stop the villain from succeeding in his nefarious plans. This formulaic plot progression, along with the shallow gameplay, made me bored out of my skull and anxious for it to be over. 

Golden Abyss looks and feels a lot like its predecessors, which means it suffers from the exact same problems that bothered me about UC1-3, except it's even worse than that, since virtually all of the fun elements have been stripped out in favor of streamlining the gameplay into something more befitting of a tablet or cellphone than a dedicated gaming device. Compared to its predecessors, UC:GA is a restrained, pedestrian experience that fails to excite or engage in any kind of meaningful way. If you enjoyed the PS3 games, it's a guarantee you won't enjoy UC:GA as much, but it makes for a decent handheld game simply because there aren't a whole lot of quality games on the Vita. If you're like me, however, and didn't care for the PS3 games, then be advised that UC:GA is a complete waste of time and money. 

Silent Hill 3: Not Quite as Good as SH2

Survival-horror is one of my favorite genres, and yet I don't like most of the survival-horror games that I play. It's a difficult genre to pull off, considering the entire point is to instill feelings of dread and horror in the player -- if a survival-horror game doesn't do that one, specific thing, then it's failed at its job. I've played enough of these games that basically nothing scares me anymore, and I'm good enough at these types of games that the mechanics don't do much to inspire tension within me, either, so it takes a rare, special type of survival-horror game to satisfy me.

Silent Hill 2 was one such game. I didn't think very highly of it at first, but it grew on me as I played, and even stayed with me long after I'd finished. Looking back, I realized how much of an impact its story had in elevating a borderline decent-good gameplay experience to something truly excellent. Silent Hill 3 had the unfortunate luck of following what has been commonly regarded as a monumental survival-horror game; it's difficult to top a masterpiece, and SH3 therefore never achieved the same level of acclaim as SH2. In some ways, SH3 is actually a better game than SH2, but I wasn't all that impressed with it.

As one of the last mainstream survival-horror games to be released before Resident Evil 4 changed everything, SH3 has that classic feel that I appreciate without feeling like one of those old games that hasn't aged well. The game certainly didn't feel 11 years old when I was playing it; the controls work fine, and the graphics look great. Silent Hill 3 plays identically to Silent Hill 2 and similar "old school" survival-horror games that existed before the genre became more about action than survival. Movement is slow, combat is awkward and imprecise, and the goal of the game is to explore and solve puzzles, rather than to kill everything in sight.

Silent Hill 3 employs the good type of survival-horror where ammo and healing items are scarce, which makes every enemy encounter an important debate of "can I afford to kill this thing," or "can I afford not to kill this thing." You constantly have to think about what's best for your situation; sometimes it's best to preserve ammo, other times it's best to avoid taking damage altogether. It's generally best to avoid enemies whenever possible, but unlike a lot of modern games, there's no gimmicky run-and-hide mechanism that has you seeking scripted safe zones so you can take your hands off the controls while waiting for the enemy to wander off. There's no time to rest when avoiding enemies in SH3 because you're constantly in danger. Even when returning to rooms you'd previously cleared, you often find all-new enemies, meaning you never know when you're truly safe.

I've become somewhat desensitized to horror games so not very much in this game actually scared me, but it has a pretty solid, unsettling atmosphere. The droning ambient sound effects, the distorted visuals of the alternate world, and the camera angles evoke an awful lot of tension. Ominous foreshadowing adds to the tension, like when a seemingly dead monster conspicuously disappears when returning to a familiar location, or when you hear loud pounding noises coming from some area up ahead. Certain types of enemies are genuinely creepy (like the spiky, spinning blade dudes that hang from the ceiling) and are so difficult to kill without taking damage that I nervously panicked whenever they showed up.

Some of the scripted scares missed more than they hit with me. The haunted house at the theme park seemed like it had potential, with me wondering whether it would be a harmless scare ride or a sinister murder vessel, but I was able to brazenly waltz through the whole thing only once feeling concerned about what might happen. The mirror room, though -- dear God -- was one of the most frightening things I've ever encountered in a horror game. That one moment was so good that it completely made up for any other shortcomings on the horror side of things.

The story, on the other hand, leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Silent Hill 2 featured a slow and steady buildup as James Sunderland arrived on the outskirts of Silent Hill, having received a letter from his dead wife urging him to meet her at their "special place" in Silent Hill. Its introduction allowed the player to make a strong connection with James as a relative outsider to Silent Hill, while offering an intriguing mystery as well as giving both the player and the character a worthwhile motivation to press on. In SH3, the player is dropped straight into a "nightmare sequence" to pointlessly fight monsters and die. Heather wakes up from her nightmare, having fallen asleep in the shopping mall, and decides to go home, only to find that the mall has turned into monster-infested hellhole like that from her nightmare.

It takes 3-4 hours (roughly half the game) before Heather gets any kind of unique motivation, and before she even arrives at Silent Hill. For those first few hours, the entire game revolves around Heather trying to get home when her world is suddenly turned upside down for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Getting home and not dying in the process feels like a totally compulsory video game task made even more dreary and uninteresting by the fact that Heather makes little reaction to what's going on. At one point she gets on a subway car intending to go home, and then for some inexplicable reason the game sends you to an industrial maintenance area, then into some sewers, and then a construction site, and Heather makes no comment whatsoever about this strange detour. There's no narrative reason to be in these areas at all; they're basically just gameplay filler.

Throughout the game you can press the action button to examine things in the environment, which brings up a text description of Heather's inner monologue as she observes the item. I like games that include these kinds of text-descriptions of things because it helps connect you with the character, in terms of what they're seeing and thinking, but examining things in SH3 rarely offers any kind of insight to Heather's psyche. Most of the time, she just states the obvious ("There are books lining the shelf,") and then dismisses it as totally irrelevant ("but I don't really need any of them right now"). Why bother programming those hotspots and writing descriptive text for them if they're not going to serve any kind of worthwhile purpose?

Puzzles feel relatively scarce in this game; I can only recall a half-dozen logic puzzles in the entire game, and two or three of them were pretty straightforward. Otherwise, the game falls victim to typical adventure game logic that has you picking up random items at random times because they'll be necessary for some puzzle up ahead. Once I picked up an empty wine bottle wondering what possible use I could have for such an item; a few minutes later I needed to move gasoline from one location to another, and it was painfully obvious that I should use the one and only item I found in the area. In another scenario I discovered a trash dump, and of all the possibly useful items, the only one I could take was an electric hairdryer, because Heather psychically knew she'd need it to defeat a water monster up ahead.

It's also a shame that so much of the game takes place in claustrophobic buildings, many of which feature a fairly linear progression through their various rooms and corridors. Tight spaces are sometimes important for making the player feel trapped with nowhere to run, but it would be nice to have more of a balance between building interiors and spacious exteriors. After all, the most common thing people associate with Silent Hill is running around the town unable to see through the thick fog; there's only one such section in SH3 (when you have to travel from the hotel to the hospital and back), and even that section is awfully limiting on where you can go. 

The game's mystery centers around a woman named Claudia, who at first seems to be the cause of the monsters trying to kill Heather, and who later kills Heather's father to get Heather to follow her to Silent Hill. Heather sets out for revenge and soon discovers that she's being used by Claudia to give birth to a cult's deity. I can't elaborate any more than that because I just did not care about this game's story -- it did not engross me in the slightest, and I never felt compelled to explore the mystery. It never felt like anything was at stake and I never understood why Heather should care about anything that's happening, let alone why I should care.

If you like survival-horror games, Silent Hill 3 is definitely worth playing because it gets the basic mechanics right and its atmosphere feels sufficiently dark and tense. It's not a particularly difficult game, but it was so draining and stressful that I could only play for an hour at a time before needing to take a break. I couldn't appreciate SH3 as much as SH2, however, because the story did absolutely nothing for me and other parts of the game felt rather nonsensical. It's a good game, but it lacks the thematic cohesion of SH2 and doesn't have as many distinct, memorable moments.