By far the most high profile of the PlayStation Vita’s various launch titles, does the first Uncharted game for a handheld and from a studio other than Naughty Dog impress or is this one journey best left forgotten?

Many have said that the Uncharted series is the closest that video games have ever come to truly capturing the spirit of the classic Hollywood blockbuster. If this is true, then Golden Abyss for the Vita is the equivalent of one of those straight to DVD spin-offs that such movies sometimes get: the kind usually set in the past to justify a smaller budget, a less skilled crew, and a new cast of younger (and generally less talented) actors attempting to faithfully recreate familiar parts. These movies are not always bad of course but they rarely come close to truly capturing the magic of the original properties they are nominally part of. Similarly, Golden Abyss comes across like a game made by people who are aware of the basics surface elements that compose the Uncharted series while still not grasping the more subtle aspects of the games that make them truly special.

Drake prepares to go to work.

Right off the bat, one major area where Golden Abyss completely falls down, either on its own merits or in comparison to the mainline Uncharted games, is in its writing. While this may strike some as an unimportant element of a series that has always positioned itself, as previously mentioned, as the video game industries answer to a blockbuster summer movie, nothing could be further from the truth. While the plots in the Uncharted series have always been over-the-top-affairs, the games have still featured far deeper examples of character building and thematic arcs than anyone might expect them to include. Not for nothing did Uncharted 2 win the Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Video Game the year it came out after all. Sadly however, while Golden Abyss keeps to the same Indiana Jones inspired affairs of its predecessors, it relies far too heavily on variations of ideas previously used in the series, especially regarding the first game (most shamelessly apparent in the let down of a reveal of just what the titular Golden Abyss really is).

Familiar plot points aside, Golden Abyss’ story could have still worked save for one thing: its characters. The game’s villains, for example, end up being so utterly cliché and lacking in style or personality to call their own, that they remain woefully pathetic adversaries for Drake and friends to go up against. Nor do the good guys in Uncharted: Golden Abyss fare any better. The worst offender is the game’s new female lead Marisa Chase who manages to fall completely flat both as a character in her own right and in comparison to the series other two female leads Elena and Chloe. They were never the kind of characters to by choice just sit by and wait for Drake to take care of business for them, yet this is exactly what Chase does throughout the nearly the entirety of Golden Abyss leading to her being a completely passive and uninteresting character in a game that is nominally centered around her and her past. And the game’s attempt to have the character change her behavior during its final levels is so clumsily and ham-fistedly written that I nearly performed a literal headdesk right then and there. At the end of the day, Chase is less a character than she is bland eye candy and rescues bait and as such she completely fails to add anything of real value to the game.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most boring and unintimidating villain to ever appear in an Uncharted game.

Even Drake ends up as little more than a pale copy of himself thanks to Golden Abyss’ dreadful writing. While Nolan North does his usual standout job of voicing the character, much of what he says lacks any cleverness and the character repeats the same small handful of lines during the platforming and gunplay sequences far too often for my liking. The game makes a few half-hearted attempts at replicating the character arcs that underlined Drake’s physical journeys in the previous games, but they just come off as not fully thought-out and shoved awkwardly into place. Easily the game’s best written character is everyone’s favorite older and grizzled treasure hunter/father figure Sully and he does manage to inject some life into the proceedings but the fact that he a. does not make an appearance until last third of the game and b. even then is only really around for 5 or so of the game’s remaining 15 chapters limits the character’s effectiveness by regulating him to the status of extended cameo.