Review: Sony PS Vita (Wi-Fi version)

Handheld gaming has come a long way in the seven years since the release of the original PlayStation Portable. The PSP had a 333MHz processor and a 3.8-inch, standard definition display. Needless to say, it’s gotten rather dated, even with the release of upgraded versions and the PSP Go. Perhaps more importantly, portable gaming now has to confront a new class of enemy – the smartphone. Smartphones are now more powerful and more portable than the original PSP, and mobile gaming has in recent years been dominated by games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, which provide bite-sized chunks of entertainment without a real, immersive experience.

This is where the PlayStation Vita comes in.

The Vita, priced in New Zealand at $450 for Wi-Fi and $550 for Wi-Fi and 3G, is probably the most powerful handheld device on the market. It has a quad-core, 2GHz CPU and a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. Add a 5-inch, 960 x 544-pixel display and a mixture of both touch and button controls, and the Vita is not really comparable to a smartphone at all. It provides an entirely different experience. Frankly, it’s a monster.

The Vita is designed to give you experiences beyond Angry Birds. The folks marketing the device have been saying it’s like having a PlayStation 3 in your pocket – that’s not quite true, but not that far off base either. The Vita is for hardcore gamers – the ones who use their PlayStation 3 at home to play games like Call of Duty, Heavy Rain, or Uncharted.

It’s clear that Sony have really listened to what hardcore gamers want in a device. The Vita is the first handheld to have dual thumbsticks, which are almost essential for a really enjoyable first-person shooter experience. The thumbsticks feel solid to use – more solid than Nintendo’s 3DS thumbstick – and make camera control and movement as easy as it is on a classic dual-shock controller. The tactile buttons are also easy to use for those who are accustomed to gaming on a PS3.

That said, Sony have also incorporated a number of modern features designed for mainstream, casual gamers. The Vita has both a front and rear touchpad and a gyroscope, and many of the more casual games are either primarily touch- or movement-based. Launch title Little Deviants, for example, requires you to use the rear touchpad to roll a ball around an environment by pushing up the ground beneath it. The WarioWare-like game Frobisher Says actually gets you to use both the front and rear touchpad simultaneously to ‘squash’ characters on-screen.

Touch-based controls are also used to navigate the system’s user-interface, which is built on Android architecture. When in the Vita’s menus you can’t use the tactile buttons at all, which we found a little strange at first. Once we were used to controlling the device with touch, however, it became a seamless and familiar experience. All the familiar gestures are there – swipe, tap, and pinch-zoom.

Most people interested in the Vita won’t be concerned with the touch controls, though: they want an in-depth gaming experience and they want to play games the classic way, with real buttons. Fortunately, the Vita delivers here – when playing the Vita version of the blockbuster franchise Uncharted: Golden Abyss, you can choose to use touch controls when climbing around the game’s environment, or you can play the old-fashioned way and mash X to reach the next platform. Want to keep your screen clean? Well, unfortunately there are times when you are required to use touch, although those moments seem few and far between. In the preview code we played, touch was required to slash open a canvas that was blocking a doorway. Not a big deal, but it might make a few traditionalists grumpy.

Uncharted is also a great game to showcase what the Vita can do in terms of raw power and graphical capability. There was nary a hint of lag or stalling, even in high-action situations with lots of AI on-screen, and while the graphics aren’t quite as nice as they are on PS3, they’re still impressive as hell. That said, those graphics are a drain on the Vita's battery - while it has great standby battery life, the battery only lasted about four and a half hours in-game because a notice popped up to say the battery was low. That's about on par with the 3DS, to be fair, but many will find it frustrating. That said, Sony seems to have planned for poor battery life - the charging cable is a couple of metres long so you don't have to sit on the floor right by the power socket.

The Vita can also do a number of other things that the average consumer doesn’t expect from a dedicated gaming handheld. Yes, it has a web browser, but it also has apps like Skype, Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, as the Vita’s PlayStation Store wasn’t yet open for business at the time of writing, we couldn’t download and test these apps. The browser, however, needs work. It has tabs, and the pop-up PlayStation keyboard is much easier to use when it’s touch-based, but unfortunately websites don’t detect the Vita as being a mobile device, so the browser loads full-scale pages full of graphics, Java and Flash, which caused numerous errors. It would also have sucked up a lot of data, had we been using a 3G version of the device.

There’s no doubt that the Vita is a great device, but there are just a couple of niggling problems that we can’t get over. The first, and most important, is the price. If you compare the price to a high-end tablet, given that it can perform many of the same tasks, the Vita looks positively cheap. But consumers don’t expect those kinds of prices for a handheld game console. Add into consideration the added cost of the Sony-branded memory cards – the Vita won’t accept a regular SD or microSD – and the Vita carries a hefty price tag when buying within New Zealand. (Hint: you don’t have to, if you don’t need it on day one. The Vita is region-unlocked, so can be imported from the US for US$250 plus shipping. You can still buy games in New Zealand and they’ll work.)

The other major concern is the sheer size of the device. In order to accommodate all those buttons, the thumbsticks, and the 5-inch screen, the Vita is rather chunky. Not a problem if you carry a bag around everywhere, but many men don’t, and the device won’t fit in most of their pockets (certainly not comfortably).
When we first heard about the Vita, we weren’t seriously excited. When we got hands-on time late last year, however, actually holding and using the device changed our minds. If you want that real gaming experience in a handheld, the Vita is a more-than-capable competitor to Nintendo’s 3DS, and will offer so much more than a smartphone could. We definitely think there’s still a place for a device like this one – at the right price.