The left stick and D-pad are placed closely enough on PS Vita that you can place the tip of your thumb on the D-pad while keeping your left thumb on the left stick for quick recovery.

That leaves sprinting, which is executed by pressing down on the directional pad. The mortar strike killstreak was blessedly simple: tap the icon to open the map, touch the target, and launch a volley of fiery death to annihilate the opposition. Once you’ve unlocked a killstreak, the icon pops up on the left side of the screen and you can tap to trigger it. Those all-important Killstreaks work the way you’d expect. That’s a highly practical implementation of the touchscreen, as players won’t have to fumble to tap a small icon during a heated CQC encounter, and we found it was quick and responsive. The knife is even quicker to use because you can tap any part of the screen not already assigned to something else to swipe your blade. The ability to independently aim your grenade throw while shooting in another direction is a new tactical wrinkle for the series, and one that will surely be leveraged by experienced players. To hurl a grenade, you simply drag the grenade icon to the area of the screen where you want to throw it, or hold it to cook the fuse before you lob it. In fact, after inverting the Y-axis, I didn’t bother asking the devs on hand about the controls – everything was where I expected it to be.Īccess to the knife, flashbang, and frag grenade that are assigned to L2/R2 or 元/R3 on PS3 are easily accessible on the front touchscreen.

So how is developer Nihilistic adapting Call of Duty to PS Vita? After playing a round on the new “Shatter” map, it’s clear their goals were to change as little as possible.

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