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Tearaway (VITA) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Tuesday 11 July, 2017 // I stopped playing this game on: Monday 17 July, 2017
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
July 17, 2017 04:05:55 PM
Finished, and yay! Yes, there's some annoynances here and there - camera gets a bit wonky sometimes, but I really enjoyed it even though it felt like it got a bit long towards the end. Curiously, I think that's mostly a design/storytelling issue. Halfway through the game they annouce "the end", but it isn't. And then it's supposed to end "again", but it doesn't, and so on. So, I was feeling ready to get to the actual end a bit to sooner than was perhaps advisable. On the other hand, I felt like every couple of levels there was some new and different gameplay. Towards the end there's a lot of motion-control gameplay where you have to rotate the PSVita (never too much, that gets annoying real fast) and stuff like that. Definitely stayed fresh in that sense! I'm curious about the PS4 game now because I know there won't be as much of that kind of taking advantage of the hardware for UI/gameplay as they did with this version?
July 14, 2017 12:01:11 PM
Media Molecule has really nailed "tactile" and "crafts-like" as a company. It all started (AFAIK) with Little Big Planet, but it goes to a new level here in Tearaway. Weirdly it's not about visual fidelity - Tearaway looks "worse" than LBP in many ways - but, it FEELS better in so many more. LBP looked and felt like a wonky diorama game where you were sort of like the puppeteer. And by wonky I mean, imprecise in a realistic way - it's not easy to move marionette - the sort of look "floaty" which was perfect. Tearaway feels much more like a papercraft imaginary storyworld. So, the sort of thing you'd daydream about rather than build with your own hands. And I really appreciate that, it makes the game feel more magical and fantastic. It's not a stop-motion Tim Burton movie-game, but rather something you might daydream about rather than build. More like old school animation rather than high-end CG... I think I'm about halfway through, and I'm looking forward to re-visiting some areas - they're full of little endearing details. The one thing I'm not too excited about? The way I hold the PSVita is counterproductive for some of the gameplay (tapping the back touch panel for jumping in some places). I can contort my hand to make it work, but I've died a few times due to a misplaced "tap". Minor annoyance to be fair.

Tearaway (VITA)