So I downloaded AC3:Liberation for my Vita yesterday. I only got to spend an hour with the game but I already regret my purchase. I did read reviews and so I expected some of these issues, but I'm suprised by how bad they all turned out to be.
-Terrible frame rate issues. literally, I don't think I've played the game for more then 30seconds without the frame rate dropping far below 30FPS.
-Horrible load times/ frequency- The game loads way too frequently, even cutscenes are interupted by loadtimes.
- As i said I'm only an hour in but the story telling so far has been abysmal. Cutscenes are awkward rushed affairs, which wilI have you looking back at the trailers and congragulating Ubisoft for creating such deceptive videos which give of the impression that this is a cinematic game.
-Pathetic sound design. Not only are most sound effects out of sync, some are compltely missing which especially noticable during fights and when sorrounding by NPC's which are supposed to be speakin. The quality of the sound itself would have you believe it you were playing a psp.
-Possibly my biggest dissapointment is the graphics. My dissapointment comes from the deceptive stills and trailers Ubisoft released which clearly were not running on the Vita itself, as they feature crisp visuals which have gone through strong anti-aliasing and being presented to you at a resolution the game doesn't run at. The game looks like an impressive wii title with a few shaders here and there. There are tons of bold ugly jaggies and the textures aren't very impressive.
AC1 was a flawed game but this makes it look like a masterpiece.
Had a console ps2/GC game been released with all the technical/presentation flaws of this game and it would be universally panned. Its seems many critics are giving it a pass because it is the 1st of its kind on a handheld. As you can tell I'm very annoyed and dissapointed. Ubisoft managed to avoid suspision with smartly presented previews but this was clearly a rushed, 2nd rate effort which have been have a really good game had they taken another 6 months to tidy it up. To me this is really worrying, it seems no western 3rd partys do't care about the games they bring to the Vita, all they see is an opportunity for money. The only hope for the PsVita is Japanese 3rd partys (who all prefer the 3DS) and Sony's 1st parties who are prioritising ps3 and probably ps4.
EDIT: I just found out that apatch has been released, which improves it s performance somewhat.
