Tearaway - PS Vita

Hi guys!  Gigs here.  We recently traveled from our little hometown in Phoenix, Arizona to Austin, Texas for our yearly RTX adventure.  It was pretty amazing and we saw so much cool stuff.  I'm super excited about Song of the Deep, we got to play that and it's so pretty and seems like a lot of fun.  We got the amazon notice that it shipped today so I'm very eagerly waiting to play it. 

 

In the mean time, I had started playing Tearaway.  Mostly due to the fact that I was super drawn to it's graphics.  It looked uber cute and Mr. Hensley handmade origami flowers for my wedding bouquet; so papercraft definitely has a place in my heart.  So I started playing it on the PS4 because I couldn't find the charger for the Vita.  However I switched (once Mark found the charger) back over the the Vita for our trip since it's way easier to play on a plane (and we didn't bring the PS4 with us.  We brought the Wii U)  :D

Tearaway!  I haven't played LittleBigPlanet yet because I was under the mistaken assumption that there wasn't a story to it; that it was only build your own levels.  I knew that Tearaway was different so I started with that one.  Developed by Media Molecule and published by Sony, Tearaway is an adorable platform adventure game.  You assist Atoi, the messenger as s/he tries to deliver a message to the face in the sun, AKA your face. 

If you don't know, I'm a pretty pathetic gamer.  Until recently I'd never beaten a Zelda game because I claimed they were too difficult.  Tearaway for me is the perfect difficulty level.  The controls on it are super easy to use.  One aspect I found really neat is that you start off only being able to use a few buttons and you gain more abilities as the story progresses.  I never knew that was something I wanted until this game.  I'm bad with right and left and some times I really get tripped up with button placement (remember: still new to gaming) and it makes it SO easy to not get mixed up.  You get used to using the correct button before they add another one into the mix.

Another crazy aspect of the controls is the touch pad on the back of the Vita.  This being my first time playing on it, I'm not familiar with if most games make use of the touch pad.  In Tearaway it allows you to help Atoi get out of some tight spots, either by activating a drum-like jump mechanism or allowing you to interact with the world in some way.  A neat, well-executed addition.

The other aspect about this game that I also really love is how they lay out the menu in the stages.  Each level has different items and tasks to complete.  Pushing the select button brings up this menu and shows you the specifics of that level: what you've gotten and what you've missed.  SCORE!  No more googling walkthroughs for me anymore.

The story is cute, the graphics are even cuter, this game is batting 1000 with me so far.  I would definitely recommend it to everyone I know, especially people who are more casual gamers.  However, the one caveat I have is that I'm not quite finished with it yet.  So if the ending is crap lousy, I'll for sure revisit this post and make some updates.  But come on with a game this adorable:

how can you go wrong?!

Have you played Tearaway?  Thoughts?  What about LittleBigPlanet?  Or if you have any recommendations for similar games I would LOVE to hear them.  I can add them to my list right after Song of the Deep.  :D  Gonna go finish Tearaway now.  Cheers.

~Gigs