(This review will be in a different format than my usual reviews because it’s difficult to say very much about one or more of the sections)
| Developer | Various |
| Publisher | |
| Franchise | N/A |
| Genre | |
| PSTV | No |
| Physical English | No |
It’s safe to say that Vita was a hotbed of different ideas for Sony – different hardware revisions (both handheld and hardware), a variety of controller inputs and ill-fated initiatives like PlayStation Mobile. PlayStation Home Arcade falls squarely in the latter camp – it’s an attempt to bring the mini-games of PlayStation Home to Vita and while the initial offering is free, there’s barely any meat to anything here.
So as soon as you download it, you have access to two full games (Ice Breaker and WipEout 2D) as well as a demo for a third (Scribble Shooter). The idea behind the product is that you download additional titles for a fee which link with your PlayStation Home account on PS3 but unfortunately that service is long shut down, meaning the things you can get in this package (which is still up in the store) is extremely limited.
So I’ll start with the most basic – Scribble Shooter is, as the name suggests, a scrolling shooter with a hand-drawn aesthetic, like someone scrawling doodles over a piece of paper. Gameplay-wise it’s simple but nails the basics, you move from the bottom to the top of the screen firing lasers and collecting pickups from enemies you’ve destroyed, before you meet the boss at the end of the level which poses a bit more of a challenge. Of course, as a demo that’s all there is to it – you can no longer download the full thing, making it a fleeting distraction.
Ice Breaker on the other hand is more complex, even if it is a fairly beat-for-beat clone of Breakout. In it, you control a paddle that moves across the bottom of the screen and your goal is to bounce a ball back to the blocks opposite to smash them all. Depth comes from various power-ups you can collect (bigger/smaller paddle, multiple balls for complete mayhem to annihilate the blocks) as well as enemies that stand on the blocks and fire projectiles at you. It’s a fairly enjoyable time-waster if you’re looking, although not one I can particularly see myself returning to in future.
As a huge WipEout fan I was excited to see what 2D offered but it’s unfortunately nothing exciting. This is a top-down racer that, to its credit, recreates many iconic tracks (Sol 2, Vineta K etc) and keeps the whole boost pad/tight corners design from the console entries, but thanks to some incredibly fiddly turning mechanics it wasn’t anything that particularly clicked for me. It’s inoffensive and decent considering you can play it for free, but it’s a long way from the quality that WipEout usually offers.
And… that’s it for PlayStation Home Arcade, at least as of the time of writing. Apparently, more were available for a nominal fee in the past – Asteroids, Centipede and Frogger for example, which might have made this a rather enjoyable retro player within Vita’s library. As it stands though, the free download you can get off the store might be good for wasting an hour or two if you’re bored and skint, but otherwise there’s very little here to recommend.
Conclusion
For a free download, you’re getting two alright titles here and one demo, but realistically there’s so many better ways to spend your time on Vita that unless you’re absolutely desperate, I wouldn’t play PlayStation Home Arcade. It’s a shame the extra games are now gone, but like so many things Sony does, this just demonstrates a sad missed opportunity.
3.5/10
kresnik258gaming 