Baud Attitude

After playing through Call Of Duty: The One For the Vita and Assassin’s Creed: The One For the Vita, I thought that it might not be a bad idea to actually try a game designed specifically for the system.

Fortunately, I subscribed to Playstation Plus recently and wound up with several to choose from.

Only one of them featured the exploits of a cute girl and her gravity-altering cat, so Gravity Rush it was.

The girl is also named Kat, by the way.

The world of Gravity Rush is a collection of psuedo-European towns on floating sky islands, connected by trains and aircars.  For some reason, bits of these flying islands have been breaking off and disappearing, and the plot, after a couple of introductory tutorial-style missions, revolves around you (a) restoring these missing islands from surreal alternate dimensions and (b) foiling the plans of a master thief.

Well, that’s the first half anyway.  After that, you discover that an offhand comment from an NPC in one of the very early levels is actually tied to the real plot, which is a bit darker and more serious.

It is, I suppose, spiritually a platformer.  You traverse a variety of fantastic environments, picking up gems to spend on powering up your abilities, you occasionally fight a boss, and there’s a lot of jumping (falling) on heads.

There’s just not much platforming.

The core gimmick of the game, as the title suggests, is gravity manipulation.  Put simply, you get to decide, at any moment, which direction you consider “down”, at which point you fall in that direction until you hit something or press the button which cancels gravity completely.

This is easily described in two pictures:

1) A game screenshot:

2) The same screenshot, now rotated so that “up” is actually at the top of the image.

With the ability to make “down” be whatever it is you like, you get a freedom of movement that is unlike anything I’ve played before.  It does take a while to adjust to the notion that you’re not actually flying so much as falling with style, at least in my case, but I pretty much had a permanent grin on my face once I got the hang of it.  There’s a button to press that more-or-less reorients the camera to suit conventional ideas of up and down if you ever get totally lost.

Adjusting to combat took a little more work – there’s a lot of lining gravity up JUST SO in order to send Kat flying in the general direction of a brightly-illuminated weak spot on a boss, and I will confess that a couple of the boss fights had me clenching my teeth as I charged just in time for the boss to move out of my way.

Also, the final fight is on a timer which made for extra unfun times.

That said, it was a solid ten hours of fun marred only by about half an hour of annoying boss fights.  It also has a fantastic soundtrack, and fortunately someone else has already gone to the trouble of finding youtube clips so you can listen to it.

Finally, a couple more screenshots with less confusion about which way “up” really is.

Above: Kat takes the train between two towns.  Sadly, no pets are allowed so she has to ride on the roof.

And here’s a visual of the sort of stuff you see in the alternate dimensions.  This game is about as far as you can get from a brown and gray color palette.

Let me just get all the bad things out of the way to start: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation is a mess in some ways.  It’s glitchy at times, particularly with regards to character animations, the enemy AI can be as dumb as toast at times, the plot is all over the place, and – for a series where you normally have a great deal of freedom in how you accomplish goals – you are far too often forced into doing things This One Way.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the tacked-on touch controls and the “hold your Vita to the light and rotate it to solve this puzzle” bits.

However, after playing ACIII, it’s obvious that the Liberation team had a much better idea about what constitutes FUN.

Fun is… running across rooftops, past guards who are barely able to get out a “hey…” as you dash past, jump to a lightpost, and then continue on to the next building, leaving them trailing impotently in your wake.

Fun is… walking into a fancy dress ball in a glamorous evening gown, luring your intended victim off to the side with feminine charm, and making with the stabby stabby while the banal small talk of the party continues around you.

Fun is… stalking a column of soldiers from the trees, downing one at a time with darts from your blowgun, driving the survivors into a higher and higher panic all the while, then jumping down and taking the last half dozen on face-to-face.

Actually, I’m not sure whether I enjoyed the blowgun more or the bullwhip.  Both are new to this installment of the series, I believe, and both are terribly fun.  The bullwhip, in particular, breaks the somewhat tedious counter-based combat by letting you yank opponents off balance, drag them towards you, and hit them with an axe as they pass.

Fun is NOT an endless supply of near-psychic guards and sticking to the ground floor, as it were, just because climbing into the rooftops in Boston or New York almost always meant interminable escape sequences.

Put simply, I’m glad that I played the two games in the order I did.  I was able to grit my teeth and get through ACIII because I was invested in the Desmond story and wanted to see how it played out, but I might have had a hard time putting up with it if I had played Liberation first.

If you played ACIII and loved the homesteading and hunting and trading parts, mind you, you might have exactly the opposite opinion. 🙂

All that said, it doesn’t add a whole bunch to the Assassin’s Creed canon, which is good considering how few Vita there are out there compared to consoles that can play the main series entries, but it was nice to see that there ARE some assassins out there who aren’t related to Desmond bloody Miles and the story went into some pretty heavy hitting themes.

…and I don’t even have to add “for a video game” to that last sentence.