Likewise, once you’ve got the hang of it, I can see the appeal of being able to bring a game like Space Hulk with you on the go. While there’s the odd control that can be a bit of a pain to execute (making the space marines turn in the exact direction you’d like can be a bit annoying), for the most part you’re essentially getting the best of both worlds. That’s equally true here, only with the added bonus that most of those commands that require a more delicate touch (on account of the on-screen icons being so small) can be pressed using buttons. So what makes it well-suited to the Vita? For starters, there’s the simple fact that Space Hulk is a board game at heart, and if we’ve learned nothing else from mobile gaming it’s that board games go spectacularly well with touch controls. You can always quit out to the main menu to take a look at the instructions, but that means going through the hassle of load screen after load screen, and by the time you’ve gone out and back again you’ll be lucky if you’ve retained most of what you just read. The alternative, of course, is carefully read through the instructions, but that requires having a photographic memory, since - early on, especially - this game takes an infodump approach to telling you what to do, and much of it seems to assume you have a prior knowledge of the game. While you’ll be able to pick up things as you go along, that means a lot of trial and error along the way. I don’t want to give short shrift to the complexity, though. Basically, every time you want to do anything, expect to wait anywhere from five seconds to up to a minute for it to happen. Moving your players: load screens (albeit relatively short ones). Not only does that mean reading all kinds of explanatory screens with lots of very tiny text, it means the game is plagued with long load times every step of the way. Without even getting into the whole Warhammer 40K Space Marine mythos - which, I confess, I know nothing about beyond what little I gleaned from the 2011 PS3 title - Space Hulk is a pretty complex board game trying to fit into a relatively bite-sized experience. On the one hand, it’s not exactly geared towards pick-up-and-play-style handheld gaming. I can’t decide whether Space Hulk is the perfect game to play on the Vita, or the absolute worst.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |