Short preview of the first part og the game it is then... (will avoid anything about the story because some people will consider that spoilerish)
The preview part of the game starts of in Paris. You control Sly in some kind of Tutorial level, where you get introduced to the controls.
Left stick to move, right stick moves camera. Works great on the Vita. You jump on X, and land on the special illuminated ledges with O. This works fine most of the time, but when there are more than one of these illuminated places right next to each other, you often land on the wrong platform, rope etc.
Once the introduction level is over you are presented with a very nice looking stylish cutscene. It looks like a cartoon and is very well made, BUT there are some serious problems when you see time travel cutscenes. The cutscene gets blurry and you can see LOTS of big sprites whenever the camera moves to fast.
After the scene is over, you are in the new timezone. You are presented with a Home-hub screen. Here you have several screens.
- Arcade.
- Treasures.
- Timetravel.
- Costumes.
- Character screen.
The hub looks good and you there are lots of nice touches there. You start a mission by going to the Character screen and choose a character you want to play with. You can choose bentley, Murray or Sly in the preview levels. Only one of them has a mission though. If you choose a character without a mission you are able to freeroam the timezone, so that you can collect treasures, bottles or masks.
The missions in the Preview levels are pretty varied. One mission starts out with Sly taking pictures of diferent stuff, so that Bentley can make a plan to move on. Then you have to sneak up on some enemies and steal stuff from them, so that you can get enough parts to make a costume that Sly can use. You have to slowly move behind an enemy and then press O to pickpocket him. This is very easy because the enemies move in predetermined patterns. Once you have all the parts you get acces to a costume that you can use whenever you want, but that costume is also vital to make the story move on.
The preview levels do not make much use of the Vita´s touch screens (luckily). You only use the frontscreen touch to change costume (a single press), and use the binoculars. The backtousch is used, but it is actually used fine. If you touch it once you get an arrow showing where you have to go to get futher in the missions (and it shows how many bottles etc. you have collected).
The actual world you play in is really nice, the first timezone is quite big, and looks really good. Graphics look good, and the sound is great. Unfortunatly I expirienced some slight framerate problems and slowdown in the preview levels. But nothing gamebreaking at all.
The real downer for me are the loadtimes in the preview levels.
Let´s say I start at the Timezone Hub. I choose Sly because he has a mission. Now the game loads the timezone world. This takes like 45+ seconds. Then you move around the world, and finish the mission objectives. If these objectives include moving inside a building or something, the game loads again (30+ seconds). This doubles if you have to move in and out of a building.. add to that time for loading cutscenes.. and then when the mission is finished, you go back to the hub again. Thats another 45+ seconds loadtime.
But remember this is only my expirience with the preview part of the game, can´t say about the rest of the game (for now).. but the loadtimes are bad for a handheld game, it really brings you out of the game. You spent alot of time looking at the loadscreen, which is a Sly icon and some statistics (treasures, trophies, bottles etc.)..
this is just a quick preview I jut wrote here at work.. will have a better longer preview up later next week on another website.. sorry for the bad grammar, but I´m Danish and my english isn´t that good. lol..and I wrote this during a busy work day on a broken keyboard...
but aks away.. overall the game plays fine and it looks really good..
edit: top of page.. buy a Vita game..!
