CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS DECLASSIFIED

FAR FROM A SYSTEM SELLER.

→ NOVEMBER 16, 2012 If you’ve longed for a proper first-person shooter on Vita, one that makes excellent use of its unique capabilities and second analog stick, you’ll be sorely disappointed with Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified. Declassified’s clumsy controls exacerbate the frustration that comes from playing poorly designed single and multiplayer levels, while the horrible AI and lack of polish makes it feel like it was rushed out the door. No, this is not the Call of Duty you’ve been waiting for; it’s one you definitely need to avoid.

For all the criticisms leveled against the Call of Duty franchise, one thing that’s been pretty much untouchable when it comes to the console and PC versions is the responsiveness and precision of its controls. Declassified, however, doesn’t meet the mark. The controls feel floaty and the unchangeable aim acceleration made me constantly overshoot targets when trying to do small aim adjustments. The on-screen touch controls also function poorly, and I regularly hit them unintentionally simply because they’re either placed too close to one another or to the thumbsticks. This isn’t a matter of having to learn a new control system, it’s just unwieldy and aggravating to use.

Black Ops 2 shows that Call of Duty games can have great narratives, but Declassified’s is a mess. Instead of a coherent plot the “story” is a series of random events that happened to characters from the Black Ops series, with some shoehorned tie-ins to plot points from the first and second games. The story never builds up to anything, and there’s no progression or development of the characters. It’s simply a device put in there as an excuse to connect it to the Black Ops games.

The campaign levels themselves don’t do anything interesting with either the Vita or with their design, either. Each stage is a two to five minute distillation of something we’ve all

 done in every other Call of Duty game, with no pacing changes or moments of spectacle to provide a hook. One mission you’re rushing through to rescue some hostages, the next you’re sniping to cover an ally. You’re always on the hunt to gun down waves of cloned enemies whose atrociously bad AI will have them shooting walls or cars directly in front of them or getting stuck on parts of the environment. The levels couldn’t end fast enough, because, despite their short length, they feel monotonous and repetitious.

The repetitious nature of the stages is due in part to the lack of any sort of checkpoint system whatsoever. The levels only last a few minutes, but because the enemies seem to have some sort of X-Ray vision they’ll be shooting at you as you round corners, and whole rooms of them will pour entire clips of ammo onto your position, meaning you’ll be getting shot. A lot. Even on Regular difficulty you die surprisingly fast, making it so I had to sit through the same unskippable intro sequences before levels all too often.

The other single player components of Declassified come down to a series of survival missions and time-trial runs through environments filled with shooting range-style targets. Extra content wouldn’t be a bad thing, except that both are hampered by the same control issues as the story missions, and, in the case of survival, idiotic enemies. Survival might be worth it if you could play cooperatively, but alone it’s just an excuse to sit in a small map and fight both the enemies and the bad controls.

Multiplayer on the go should have been the reason for Declassified to exist, but it stumbles at almost every turn. First, the good: the menus look like the console Call of Duty titles, and I dig how Declassified manages to bring slightly less feature rich takes on custom classes and other multiplayer staples to the Vita. Things swiftly fall apart after you get into a match, though, with bugs that include players appearing mid-air and terrible spawn issues that make you start right in front of enemies. A small number of maps can work if they’re great, but all of Declassified’s feel tiny even with 8 players.

The few included modes would be enough for me if Declassified’s multiplayer was fun, but the poor controls make just getting through a match a lesson in patience. It’s one thing to lose because you’re outclassed by your competition, but another to fail because you accidentally slash the air when trying to call in a Killstreak, or you swing your weapon past your intended target because the aiming just doesn’t feel right. Sure, you could spend hours leveling up and unlocking stuff in Declassified’s multiplayer, but when it’s this bad why would you bother?

THE VERDICT

The Vita’s primed and ready for a great first-person shooter, but Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassifieddisappoints in almost every way. Bad multiplayer, awful story, generic level design and a host of other issues turn what could have been Vita’s biggest blockbuster into one of its biggest duds.

Persona 4 Golden

EVERY DAY’S GREAT AT YOUR JUNES.

→ NOVEMBER 21, 2012 Four years ago, IGN deemed Persona 4 “amazing” on the PlayStation 2. Today, I’m saying the same thing about Persona 4 Golden on the PlayStation Vita. With its slick HD visuals, peppy voice actors and engaging story, the Japanese role-playing game stands among the best titles on Sony’s handheld, but when you toss in how deep the gameplay is and how much there is to do, Persona 4 Golden becomes the stuff of legend.

Persona 4 Golden is equal parts high school drama and dungeon crawling action. Our protagonist moves to the countryside town of Inaba, makes some friends at school, and – bam – a woman’s murdered. Over the course of the game, the protagonist and his buds uncover a serial killer tossing victims into another world via TV screens, and the group of high schoolers is the only thing that can save the day.

Think of this as a tale of super-powered, high school-aged detectives. See, the kids are the modern day Monster Squad because they wield Personas, which are kind of like spiritual Pokemon. When a turn-based battle kicks off, the kids can call in a Persona to attack with ice moves, fire punches and so on.

That’s the basic line on Persona 4 Golden, but there’s so much more going on. That’s the strength and weakness of the game – it’s dauntingly huge. There are well

over 150 Personas to collect, and getting them all will require you to fuse different ones together. Now, when you’re fusing, you’ll need to check the fusion forecast and see what days of the week will get you what Persona bonuses, but then you need to keep in mind your Social Links, too, as those will influence the number of moves Personas get. Of course building those relationships comes down to properly managing your afterschool time.

That’s a mouthful, and if you’re just trying to grind out a dungeon, it can be a bit much. I’m not against intricate systems playing off one another, but Persona 4 Golden could do more to explain the ins and outs of what it’s up to.

But in the end, that doesn’t matter. Even I, IGN’s village idiot, figured out what books my character needed to read in order to improve his Diligence (one of the five upgradeable traits that influence your conversations) and what people I needed to spend time with to make my Jack Frost Persona more powerful. If a game’s biggest problem is giving you a lot to do and not bogging you down with tutorials, it’s sitting pretty, and Persona 4 Golden is approachable regardless of your JRPG expertise.

“

Persona 4 Golden is perfectly at home on the handheld and should dominate your free time.

That’s always been a hallmark of the series; anyone can jump in. You don’t need to have played another Persona to understand this one as the characters and setting are brand new. Even though the action is otherworldly, the story is relatable. Trying to make friends, fit in at school and get a significant other are themes we all understand, and that’s why the non-combat stuff is as good as the fighting.

Living in Inaba, you’ll attend school and take pop quizzes. You’ll have part-time jobs. You’ll join sports teams and clubs. You’ll choose dialogue responses that affect relationships. The Walking Dead: The Game is getting a lot of attention right now – deservedly so – for giving players choices and allowing them to mold the game into a personal experience. Persona 4 does that; it’s not as drastic as The Walking Dead, but you can tell people off, make bold plays on girls if you’ve built up your Courage, and build your party as you see fit.

Everything you’re doing in the game is building your character and your party so that when you enter one of the game’s dungeons, which are visually varied and based around the kidnapped character, you’re fighting the way you want to. You’re entering these turn-based encounters where you need to analyze enemies to determine the element they’re weak to and then unleashing the pimped out Persona you’ve been building your character around. It’s a rush to grind and grind only to find that your squad is powerful enough to topple an enemy that used to give you trouble, and that’s a rush you’ll find again and again in Persona 4 Golden – especially seeing as how a playthrough can take 60 hours and then open New Game Plus.

Bring the sexy back.

Now, every lovely thing IGN said in its 2008 review of Persona 4 pretty much applies to Persona 4 Golden – from the detailed rundown of the story to the little stuff like your inability to get tired in a dungeon (you can explore until your heart’s content). But that does mean the game can feel antiquated as it’s 4 years old. You can only save in certain spots, side quests don’t hold your hand like the ones in Mass Effect, and while there are cutscenes, most of the story is told through images, text and some really well done voice work. I find all this charming, but it’s worthy of a heads up.

If you’re looking for what the Vita version of Persona 4 adds to the 4-year-old game, we’ve already covered the major stuff with the redone visuals and new lines of dialogue. However, Persona 4 Golden adds some online functionality to the mix, but none of it’s all that newsworthy. At times, a “voice” icon will appear, and you can see how other people have spent their time in the game at that moment. It’s a nice idea, but it’s just a bunch of word bubbles that pop on the screen. There’s no helpful information. Meanwhile, in dungeons, you can send out an SOS and then get words of encouragement from online players and a stat buff at the beginning of the next battle.

There’s a new character in the Velvet Room’s Marie who comes complete with her own Social Link to max out and story to investigate. She’s an interesting addition, but I don’t want to ruin her tale for you.

THE VERDICT

The PlayStation Vita is lucky to have Persona 4 Golden. While the game doesn’t do much of note besides bringing the 2008 title to the HD era, it doesn’t need to. The story hooks you, dungeon crawling makes for a great time, and exploring your relationships while building a better army is the kind of tinkering you can get lose hours to. Persona 4 Golden is perfectly at home on the handheld and should dominate your free time.

LEGO The Lord of the Rings

THIS... DOES NOT... PASS...

→ NOVEMBER 26, 2012 Like many 21st century nerds, I have a deep love for Peter Jackson's film adaptation of Tolkien's seminal fantasy trilogy. Until I sat down to dig into the portable version of LEGO Lord of the Rings, I believed that I could be made to love anything so long as the film's main theme was running in the background. I was wrong; oh so terribly wrong. I can forgive a lot of mistakes when I see a good game hidden behind them, but there comes a point where even Adagio in D Minor fails to garner my sympathy. LEGO Lord of the Rings hits that point almost immediately and never redeems itself.

Get them studs, Frodo.

For those late to the party, the LEGO series of games takes popular entertainment franchises like Star Wars or Batmanand attempts to distill them down into charming, LEGO themed puzzle/platformers with a side of action. The series has often been quite successful in this endeavor due to both the parity between the colorful source material and the LEGO universe as well as the sturdily designed game mechanics, which while simple enough for young folk to reason out, usually manage to be fun for the parents and older sibling who inevitably get roped into playing. But LEGO LOTR makes so many cardinal errors in terms of gameplay that even at its best, it bores. And at its worst, it frustrates, regardless of how young or old you are.

Take the combat for instance. It seems appropriately simple for this style of game and the intended audience, but wonky targeting and criminally unresponsive controls make it a complete chore.

 It's kind of sad when all you have to do is mash the attack button over and over, and yet the game still can't read your inputs right. Even when it does, the clunky looking combo animations carry you right past your target often, forcing you to miss them entirely and sometimes sending you down one of the games many pits of insta-death.

Not only do enemies fail to react to landed blows, they attack through them, interrupting your offensive and making you take unavoidable damage. It's like a bad ‘80s beat 'em up, except you couldn't accidentally kill your braindead AI partner in those. You can in LEGO Lord of the Rings, thanks to the presence of friendly fire. If you've always secretly wanted to kill Samwise, you can now do it over and over to your black, shriveled heart's content. Me, I'd rather have had an AI partner that I don't need to fight around for fear of slaying them.

This same shoddy craftsmanship is present in nearly every aspect of the experience. Platforming feels vague thanks to a lack of player shadows and a positively unruly camera, with which you'll fight just as often as any Uruk-hai. Swinging from one tree branch to the next as an elven prince should feel airy and swift, but here it feels heavy and sluggish.

Despite having such rich, awe inspiring locations to draw from, exploration is a big letdown, too. The majority of the levels are linear in nature, which is totally fine, but there are times when the game gives you the freedom to roam about. This would be wonderful if the levels were well designed and visually interesting, which they somehow aren't. These LEGO recreations fail to capture the scale and majesty of their iconic Middle Earth counterparts in any way. On the 3DS, I can understand being a bit limited in terms of power, though I think it's capable of much more than what's on display here, but for the Vita, this is inexcusable. Dreary, washed out colors make the LEGO elements indistinguishable from the non-LEGO ones, which robs the former of its trademark charm, and the latter of its magical ambiance.

Get'em.

From the big stuff like level design, all the way down to the little things like how collectible LEGO studs are placed, nothing in LEGO LotR feels quite right, even the audio package, which was ripped straight from the films. It's all heavily compressed, giving it a crushed, distant quality that makes it sound cheap and tinny. As memorable as everyone's performances were in the films, having the dialogue chopped up so badly to fit on cartridge defeats the whole purpose, and comes off as a lazy attempt to curry favor with fans. Yet, any true fan of the films will be baffled by some of the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor considering what ended up getting used. And hearing Howard Shore's excellent musical score while taking in such sub-standard visuals ends up being a constantly jarring reminder of how much promise the game held, and how far short of that promise the final product falls.

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THE VERDICT

While it does offer the bevy of collectibles and unlockable characters you've come to expect, LEGO Lord of the Rings doesn't deliver the rest of the goods on handheld systems. Graphical concessions, technical issues, and sloppy design mar the experience from beginning to end, keeping the magic and wonderment of Middle Earth from ever shining through. It's a disappointing and ill-timed misstep for a franchise that's typically been fun for players of all ages. Save your money for a different game, or better yet, the superior console version.

PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE

KICK, PUNCH, YOU ALL REMEMBER.

→ NOVEMBER 20, 2012 PlayStation All-Stars isn’t Smash Bros. I know that that’s been the popular line since All-Stars was officially revealed, but anyone who’s spent considerable time with both games – and I have – will identify almost instantaneously the deep-seated fallacy in that line of thinking. Indeed, while PlayStation All-Stars is clearly inspired by what Nintendo has done with its famous brawler, the comparisons end on the periphery. Smash Bros. is its own thing, its own unique take on heavily competitive, fun and accessible multiplayer madness. It totes a well-earned legacy because it’s a phenomenal series.

PlayStation All-Stars, on the other hand, is a bona fide fighting game, and its maiden foray on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita attempts to carve out its own, more technical niche. The game’s developer, SuperBot Entertainment, was specifically created to make this game, and the team – with some help from Sony Santa Monica -- succeeded in making a fun mash-up catered to the legions of PlayStation fans out there. It may, however, struggle to find an audience outside of the PlayStation core, not because it’s a bad game – it’s quite the opposite – but because making believers out of skeptics will first require them to play it.

At the center of the PlayStation All-Stars experience rests its core of 20 playable characters (with more on the way as DLC). These characters run the gamut from the super-popular (Nathan Drake, Kratos) to the up and coming (Sackboy, Cole MacGrath) to the outright obscure (Toro, Fat Princess). There are even awesome nods to dormant Sony-owned franchises (Sir Dan, Nariko) and some third party love as well (Big Daddy, Dante). It’s a well-rounded cast, and while there are some obvious exclusions that frustrate fans of the brand, there’s something here for anyone who loves PlayStation.

Due mostly to the pedigree of some of the development veterans on SuperBot’s staff, PlayStation All-Stars plays more like a fighting game than you may expect, and is more complicated,

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale puts many of your favorite PlayStation heroes and villains into battle arenas for crazy 4-man fighting bouts.

nuanced and technical than Smash Bros. With the exception of Good Cole MacGrath and Evil Cole MacGrath, no two characters play alike to the point where they’re considered outright palette swaps. All-Stars comes packing considerable depth, one of the major things that helps it stand out. This makes running through its roster fun, with differences between characters shining through. One of the best parts about All-Stars, especially early on, is settling on your character of choice through copious experimentation.

Like its roster of characters, All-Stars’ stages take a page from PlayStation’s storied history. The game’s 14 standard levels are all mash-ups, taking influences from two entirely separate franchises to create something random and unique. Expect to find something completely out of left field (the Franzea stage borrows from Loco Roco and Metal Gear) or something truly strange (like Invasion, which mixes up Killzone and Ape Escape). And there are different kinds of stage types, too. Alden’s Tower, which combines Infamous and Sly Cooper, is a scrolling level, while Sandover Village, throwing together Jak & Daxter with Hot Shots Golf, is a small, tight stage that forces confrontation. The combinations are strange and outright bizarre. Yet, they also work nicely and call on some franchises – like Resistance, for instance – that were ignored when crafting the character roster.

A scene straight out of Uncharted 3... with a wildly different cast.

Each level is interactive and disruptive during battle, a welcome diversion that freshens up gameplay and forces you to pay attention to more than just your adversaries. For instance, on the Hades level, which crosses God of War with Patapon, the keeper of the underworld can be seen in the back, occasionally smashing the level, eliciting AP loss and temporary paralysis to anyone he strikes. When the Patapon show up later, Hades will become distracted by them, but it won’t stop them from launching arrows on the stage, which must be dodged. Each level in the game has similar features revolving around the series that inspired it, but worry not, because if you want to shut off this interactivity to fight your foes straight-up, you can. Then again, I’d recommend sticking with stage interactivity, as it makes fights more grueling.

In battle, All-Stars lacks a conventional health meter, instead relying on AP (All-Stars Points) that give players the chance to execute killing strikes called super attacks. This design decision is the game’s unexpected trump card, the true differentiator between it and other brawlers. The more you play the game, the more obvious it becomes that this was a daring design decision that was smartly made. Supers are split into three tiers, and building up your meter requires you to lay the beatdown on your enemies. All-Stars hinges entirely around effectively building up your own meter to build up your kills while doing everything in your power to dodge your foes’ killing blows. It takes some getting used to, but ultimately, the system works. It’s rewarding, different and, most importantly, enjoyable.

Keeping an eye on other players’ meters to try to identify when and how they’ll unleash their supers is incredibly tactical. Interrupting their supers or dodging them outright becomes integral to high level play. Dodge rolling, blocking and evading are just as important as going in for meter-building strikes, even in a game that lacks health. If you choose to dedicate yourself to learning All-Stars’ ins and outs, playing the game becomes an art, one that varies heavily depending on if you’re involved in a four player free for all, a two on two match, or – my favorite – a one-on-one match with a three kill limit.

Character attacks are mapped to the square, triangle and circle buttons. When combined with analog stick movement, character movesets begin to become truly complicated, giving players a smorgasbord of choice. Such options mean that there isn’t only one way to play a character. Colonel Radec, for instance, can be played at a distance, up close, or with a combination of the two, and any style is viable. Nathan Drake’s firearms are great from afar, but pummeling opponents with melee attacks may be preferable. Either style works. Differentiating characters further are their special abilities, such as Sly’s invisibility or Toro’s access to three distinct setups. Like any true fighting game, All-Stars gives players more choices than any one person will know what to do with.

Hades and the Patapon will directly affect the outcome of the fight.

Such complexities play out wonderfully in PlayStation All-Stars, giving gamers something vibrant and deep. All-Stars appears as a pick-up-and-play game, but that’s only a razor thin façade. Newcomers can have fun with the game, but it’ll take time, patience and practice to truly become competent at it, especially when facing off against high caliber opponents. Depending on who you play, how you play, and in what mode you play, All-Stars varies greatly. As a result, its lack of health meters ironically made it a more complex and tactical game than what came before it and has compounded its depth. Like in any fighting game, there are some balancing issues to deal with – Kratos generally seems too strong, and Ratchet’s level one super attack is absurdly powerful, for instance – but SuperBot intends on fixing things on the fly as they learn how players play the game, and hopefully, these issues (and others) will be attended to in short order.

All-Stars is split into a series of modes that accommodate single-player purists but decidedly slant towards those who want to play multiplayer locally or online. There are tutorials, trials and more to keep you busy, but its single-player arcade mode is the meat of the solo experience. It allows gamers to run through a mildly story-driven campaign with each character, culminating in a rivalry-based battle before pitting you against the game’s final boss. The rivalries themselves explore interesting (but shallow) story angles, some more obvious than others. It’s easy to understand why Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank might have an issue with each other, for instance, but you might have to delve a little deeper to make sense of Sackboy’s and Big Daddy’s quarrel.

Time Station is from Ape Escape, but don't expect Spike to have home field advantage.

Unfortunately, while playing against the computer in solo mode proves fun, the experience can also become redundant and predictable. I was disappointed during my first play through to see the story told through static images coupled with voiceovers for both a character’s intro and ending, accompanied by a limited, animated take on the rivalry battle itself. This is the same for each character. All-Stars could have used more love in its single-player presentation, even if the campaigns, tutorials and trials act as excellent proving grounds before jumping into multiplayer (and even if there are a flood of unlockables, from icons to cheerleader-like minions and everything in between, to earn). If SuperBot makes a sequel, this is the greatest problem in the game worthy of being fixed.

On the other hand, the multiplayer suite really shines in PlayStation All-Stars. The game is truly a blast when played with friends. Gamers will be given the option to play with up to four players locally or online, mixing and matching PS3 and Vita gamers in just about any permutation you could imagine. Have two players on your PlayStation 3 and want to match up with Vita players online? You can do that. Have three friends over, but only three DualShock controllers and a Vita? All four of you can still play in the same match, sitting in the same room. All-Stars will accommodate you with online or local play in just about any situation, and SuperBot should be applauded for making such a daunting online process spring into existence, especially because, with solid connections, the game works great online using either platform.

Whether playing locally or online, you’ll have a plethora of options to customize your experience. You can play with teams, or in a free for all. You can have a point system (with 2 points per kill and minus one point per death) or go with a kill or stock system. You can have a bunch of items turned on, such as Resistance’s Hedgehog Grenade, which stops you from using supers for a short time, or Hermes’ Boots from God of War, which give you extra speed, or you can turn them off. You can mess with the clock, you can turn off any given level’s interactivity, and more. In All-Stars, it’s all about making the experience your own.

I especially enjoyed All-Stars’ take on online play in terms of its tournament setup, which puts players through roving seasons, where statistics are kept only for a short time before they’re reset. This lets everyone start on the same playing field and keeps competition perpetual and fair. The online user interface is a bit convoluted – it wasn’t immediately clear how to play two-on-two online or play coveted one-on-one, either – but with trial and error, things are simple enough to figure out. And if you want to play online but don’t want to get crazy competitive, you can always stick to unranked matches.

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THE VERDICT

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale isn’t perfect, and it clearly owes its existence to something very special that came before it. But it’s also special in its own right. PlayStation fans have long had to deal with unfair comparisons to Smash Bros. while eagerly awaiting this game, but the wait is over, and now you can see for yourself that the two games are as different as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

PlayStation has a proud, nearly two-decade-long legacy, and All-Stars celebrates it. It combines characters, environments and ideas into a tight package that’s worthy of consideration for anyone who owns a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita and considers themselves a brand loyalist or simply a longtime fan. The fact that the experience is identical on both platforms, that you’ll receive both versions for the price of one, and that progress can be shared between PS3 and Vita to make one ubiquitous ecosystem is hopefully a sign of what’s to come with PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita and beyond (even if the game is certainly more at home on PS3).

I know it’ll be hard for some skeptics to believe, but PlayStation All-Stars is its own game, and it even happens to do some things better than what inspired it. Give it a try and see for yourself.

UNCHARTED: FIGHT FOR FORTUNE

When Uncharted: Fight For Fortunewas announced, many PlayStation gamers responded negatively without having ever played the game. Disappointed that a talented studio like Sony Bend would “waste its time” on a $5 downloadable customizable card game for the PlayStation Vita, players wondered – rather vocally – what this seemingly dud-of-a-game was all about, and why it was made at all.

But you see, those people were wrong in their preemptive critiques. Uncharted: Fight For Fortune isn’t a dud. It’s flawed, but undeniably fun. Sony Bend designed the game (and created it with the help of One Loop Games) because something like this makes a lot of sense on Vita. It’s also great to see a Sony first party studio working on a tiny, cheaper game that does what so many of us have wanted Sony to focus more on for years: creating a better hodgepodge of big and small titles in order to foster a more diverse ecosystem.

The "field" of play.

Now, just because Uncharted is one of Sony’s most popular franchises doesn’t mean Fight For Fortune is for you. Conversely, if you don’t like Uncharted but The Gathering (or, as I used to play way back in the ‘90s, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game), then Fight For Fortune warrants a look. You shouldn’t go in expecting to be blown away,of Magic: The Gathering  but the game will certainly keep you happily occupied, with plenty to do and even more to unlock.

The first thing that stands out in Fight For Fortune – and what makes it so appealing – is that it’s fundamentally easy to learn, but equally rife with depth. Games like this often have a daunting façade, where intricate rules need to be learned and digested. But Fight For Fortune does a nice job of easing you into the experience with a tutorial that gives you the tools you need to figure out the game’s nuances for yourself. I went from completely puzzled to being on the road to adeptness in all of 15 minutes.

A player begins by selecting a card to place down in one of five slots. These cards are drawn from three “factions” (Hero, Villain and Mercenary) and have a specific cost to play, as well as offensive and defensive statistics. Things get a little more complicated when it comes time to begin hoarding treasure in order to utilize cards that will augment the stats and skills of cards that have already been played. For instance, you can buff-out a card’s offense or defense, give them special abilities and more, but that costs treasure that you have to accumulate over rounds. And hoarding treasure often requires taking risks, affixing valuables to at-risk cards until they can be banked.

All of this preparation culminates in Fight For Fortune’s dual approach in terms of the game’s goals. You need to fight your opponent’s cards, but you also need to fight your opponent himself (or herself), placing greater emphasis on having more cards actively played than the person on the other side of the digital table. You do damage to cards to get rid of them, and when there’s nothing standing in between your card (or cards) and an opponent, you do damage directly. Usually – especially when playing against the AI – you’ll be tasked with taking your foe’s health down to zero before he (or she) can do the same to you. Deciding when and how to do this is where the game picks up its pace and becomes really fun; it’s all based on risk/reward, and playing your hand too soon can blow up in your face just as easily as it could pay out in spades.

Fight For Fortune does have its deficits, however. Load times can be heinously long, especially when starting the game up or navigating menus. Brief in-between-round loading also breaks up the flow a bit. The AI often makes puzzling decisions; if the AI blunders a choice – which it will do from time to time – you can actually see your path to victory before you’re able to execute on it, with nothing the AI can do about it, taking the game’s excitement down a notch. Then again, the AI can also give you a run for your money. As is the case with many like games, it’s all about the hand you’re dealt (pardon the pun), and how meticulous you are in learning the game’s ins and outs.

Flawed and frustrating online play rounds out the package. Asynchronous multiplayer in 2012 continues to mystify me, specifically when it’s the only multiplayer option in a game. Fight For Fortune uses a strange amalgam of the PlayStation Network’s messaging system with some in-game tricks to create a coherent and smooth experience, but you’ll never find yourself in an actual lobby playing with someone live. Bend did a nice job of covering this up somewhat by letting you “wait” for a person to make his or her next move, but it’s not multiplayer in its purest sense. Asynchronous would have been a fine option among more choices, including live play. Then again, you can always play with a friend in person by passing your Vita back and forth, should you so desire.

I had two technical issues with the game worth noting as well. I wasn’t able, until right before the review’s publish, to get a random ranked or unranked match to work with the anonymous masses online. I was only able to consistently play online with people on my friend’s list. Investigating on Twitter found that this wasn’t the case for everyone, though it seemed to be a common problem likely created by the game’s servers being unpopulated so early after release. Still, it’s an unfortunate and glaring problem.

The tools of the trade.

Fight For Fortune also makes a big deal out of connecting to your Uncharted: Golden Abyss save by making specific cards more powerful in Fight For Fortune depending on what treasures you found and Trophies you earned in Golden Abyss. In a conversation with a Sony Bend employee, in which I playfully accused him of going easy on me, he told me that he could have destroyed me because his cards, syphoning off of his 100% complete Golden Abyss save, were far more powerful than mine. I have a pretty diesel Golden Abyss save myself, but it’s from the imported Japanese version of the game, and so I couldn’t get these perks to work. Either way, this could create some potential balancing problems online.

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THE VERDICT

Although it suffers from some inconsistent AI, spotty online matchmaking and some balancing problems created by Golden Abyss-centric augments, it’s still hard to deny that Uncharted: Fight For Fortune is a fun game. I’ve really enjoyed playing it by myself against the AI, unlocking new cards and other perks in the process. The game has no story and voice acting; it’s a cheap, no frills entry into the Uncharted universe that does things differently.The game’s also supported by already-available DLC, so if you want to pay a little more than the $5 entry fee, you can always keep the experience going for even longer.