It’s depressing to think that just a few short months ago, we thought that the 2012 holiday season was going to be a great time to own a Vita. There were big-name games coming out, attached to huge franchises. A portable Assassin’s Creed game? YES! A Call of Duty title exclusive to Sony’s handheld? That’s going to drive massive amounts of sales. Sony even announced a bundle that packed Black Ops: Declassified in with new Vita systems. That will get people excited about the hardware again, right?
The Vita isn’t just struggling in the market, it’s drowning. Sony has had to decrease expectations for portable hardware sales multiple times, and sales are lower than they were this time last year, before the Vita was even released. In other words, Sony has released new hardware, but sales of the Vita combined with sales of the PSP can’t match the performance of just the PSP last year. That’s not a dip, that’s a death spiral.
The result was a mess. The single-player portion of Declassified can be finished in around an hour. The multiplayer is weak. It barely works. There was a large patch since launch that kind of fixed some of the problems. It would have been disappointing for a $5 mobile game. As a $50 release it’s borderline criminal.
“Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified is appalling. In dramatic fashion, it completely fails to live up to the high bar of quality gamers expect from the Call of Duty name,” Game Informer wrote in its review, which for a time was amusingly surrounded by ads for the Vita bundle. “It’s also a discouraging sign for gamers like me who shelled out $250 for a Vita in the hopes of console-quality experiences on handheld. I can’t recommend Declassified to anyone; casual FPS players and Call of Duty fans alike will recognize the train wreck Nihilistic Software has developed.”
What should have been a glorious release for the embattled portable became yet another debacle for players hoping for a near-console quality experience from one of their favorite franchises. The game is currently sitting at a 29 on Metacritic, and lacks even a single positive review.
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