PlayStation Vita review

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PS VITA - INTRODUCTION

The Sony PS Vita price has dropped to around the £200 mark on its UK launch as the company banks on a dedicated mobile gaming console. “It only does everything” used to be the slogan for Sony’s Playstation 3, but it’s a phrase that could apply just as well to PS Vita. It’s a Swiss army knife of mobile gaming hardware, with so much power and so many built-in gadgets and gizmos that it’s hard to imagine any type of game it couldn’t cover and it any type of gamer it couldn’t satisfy. Whereas the PSP simply aspired to being a PS 2 in your pocket, PlayStation Vita wants more. It has the screen, the dual analogue sticks and the graphics power that hardcore gamers demand, but also the touch functionality, cameras, tilt controls and quirky download games to reach those looking for something less traditional. It’s all games machines to all men.

PS VITA - DESIGN

The physical design is an evolution of Sony's PSP Slim and Lite, the front dominated by the whopping 5-inch screen, with the dual analog pads to either side, the D-Pad on the left and the face buttons on the right, in a layout that will immediately seem natural to anyone famiiar wth a dual-shock 3 controller. Of course, PS Vita has only two shoulder buttons, modelled in clear pespex to maintain the unit’s elegant lines, but - as we’ll see later - this is less of an issue than it might seem. The Vita feels light and comfortable in your hands, and while the position of the sticks takes a little getting used to, it’s a very easy handheld to use for long periods - much more so than the rather cramp-inducing 3DS. At 280g, it’s comfortably light as well.

PS VITA - CONTROLS

The physical controls work perfectly. We had some minor doubts about the accuracy of the right analogue stick while trying to aim in Uncharted: The Golden Abyss, but in other titles it doesn’t seem to be a problem, and the feel is just right; arguably one step closer than the 3DS analogue stick in giving you what you’re used to from a full-scale controller. For FPS games it’s going to make a massive difference. And while you might miss the L2 and R2 buttons in some games, it’s unlikely to be a huge problem, for the simple reason that PlayStation Vita has what you might almost call a surfeit of other controls.The most obvious is the capacitive front touchcreen, which is fast, responsive and multitouch aware. Uncharted and many of the PS Vita launch titles use it regularly, both to provide handy onscreen buttons or menu controls, and as a means for swiping or pinching gesture controls. Then there’s the rear touch panel. Prodding it without seeing what you’re doing feels a little unintuitive at first, but once you’ve used it to push ridges in the landscape to roll a pint-sized monster around in Little Deviants, the potential starts to become clear.

Then there’s the Playstation Vita's tilt controls. You can use them in the expected way, tilting to steer in Wipeout 2043 for example, but they become useful in other games as well, allowing changes of view in the Pool game Hustle Kings, or providing an excellent means of fine-tuning sniper shots in Uncharted. Most of all, they come into their own in the Augmented Reality shenanigans of Little Deviants or Reality Fighters, with the former having you rotate physically on the spot to blast alien invaders from the real world skies that surround you, while the latter uses them to control the view of the bout happening on your floor or coffee table.

PS VITA - AUGMENTED REALITY

And it’s augmented reality that makes the most sense of PS Vita’s dual cameras. With a 0.3 megapixel resolution they were never going to be much cop for photography, and low light performance is predictably poor. Yet Sony’s initial efforts at making AR gaming work are great, bite-sized chunks of silly fun. Reality Fighters, for example, allows you to digitise your face, map it onto a CGI body, and then whack ten tons of stuffing out of Vita-owning friends or CPU-controlled opponents in the real-world environment of your choice. The fighters sit quite convincingly within the landscape in front of the lens, and while it’s a novelty act, it’s certainly a good one. The same goes for Little Deviants, where the action in the shoot-em-up segments takes place in the space around you.

All is forgiven, however, when you see that PlayStation Vita screen. An OLED number with a 960 x 544 resolution, it’s a beauty; crisp, clear, with vibrant colours, deep blacks and brightness to spare. If it doesn’t have a true 720p resolution or quite the intense clarity of the iPhone 4’s Retina display, it still goes way beyond the sub-SD resolutions we’re used to in gaming handhelds, and - at the 5in screen size - it’s hard to tell that it’s not HD. It’s an exceptional screen for watching movies or playing games on, and about as good as you’re going to get without moving up the scale to a tablet device.

While you might have expected PlayStation Vita to embrace the XMB interface of the PSP and PS3 (not to mention numerous entertainment devices), Sony has gone for a new user interface. It’s based on the LiveArea a series of vertically scrolling screens with large smarties-shaped icons, which summon odd post-it note launchers that you literally peel off the screen to shut down. When more than one launcher is open, they stack in a 3D view across the screen for easy access. It’s all a little odd, but it fits PlayStation Vita’s touch-friendly approach perfectly, and makes it easy to switch from app to app when you need to.