Uncharted Golden Abyss
+ The actual game is pretty solid too. While from a story, writing and pacing perspective it's obvious it was made by a B team and not Naughty Dog, I would still put this above Uncharted 1 on the series ranking (3 > 2 > GA > 1). It'd be unfair to criticize Bend for not being as good as Naughty Dog for those things because the truth is 98% of ALL developers aren't as good as ND at writing and pacing.
- Waaaay too many gimmicks and too many are forced. While I admit that I like the Vita's touchscreen, I don't necessarily want to have to use it to access things like the journal or reloading my weapon.
Wow I didn't even know you could reload your weapon with touch controls...
I'm enjoying the game. The art is amazing. Sometimes I just stand there admiring a wall or a rock. I wasn't too bothered with touch controls. The only thing I actually had a problem with was the story.
SPOILERS
They shoehorned a completely unnecessary romance into this. I don't care if this is supposed to be a prequel - it's not apparent where it fits in the timeline from the game - and I don't want to see Nate kissing anyone but Elena and walking off into the sunset with this new woman like he just found the love of his life. The romance also just did not develop naturally. It felt more like, "oh, wow, it's the end of the game! Nate/you won so we better reward him by giving him a female prize."
The second thing that bothered me about the story was how they absolutely destroyed this world heritage site that would have been invaluable to archaeologists. I don't care that there was an environmental hazard. Archaeologists can deal with it. Even if you can't do anything with the gold atm, the wall carvings and paintings are of immense value.
I know that Drake destroys pretty much everything he gets into in the game series, but here, it wasn't the enemies responsible for the destruction through their greed. It was Drake and Chase. It just frustrated me so much that this place was perfectly safe and preserved for centuries until Drake came along.
Assassin's Creed Liberation
- There's not as much side content as the other games, but most of the side content that is there is lame busy work. It's like they looked at AC3 and said "we need to copy what they're doing". Collectibles appear to do nothing outside of getting trohpies too.
- If you're going to make me do these awful full sync sequences (please get rid of these in AC games Ubi!) then at least tell me what they fucking are when the mission starts. Too many missions had hidden sync objectives and there's no way to check during the mission, only after.
That's just not true. You can see all optional objectives during each mission. iirc it's on the game map. You can press the drop-down arrow. I really enjoyed trying for 100%. It wasn't hard - just a little extra challenge. I thought it was well implemented.
I also really liked the collectible pages. I was surprised how enjoyable it was to get these pieces of the story out of order and try to figure out what happened and who you shouldn't trust. I really think they should have been voice acted though, and an indicator to tell you which page was new.
Also, I thought the Citizen E stuff was a brilliant idea, how after you killed him, entries into your character database would be updated and Templar/Abstergo bias and censorship would be stripped away.