When Uncharted: Fight For Fortune was announced, many PlayStation gamers responded negatively without having ever played the game. Disappointed that a talented studio like Sony Bend would “waste its time” on a $5 downloadable customizable card game for the PlayStation Vita, players wondered – rather vocally – what this seemingly dud-of-a-game was all about, and why it was made at all.

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But you see, those people were wrong in their preemptive critiques. Uncharted: Fight For Fortune isn’t a dud. It’s flawed, but undeniably fun. Sony Bend designed the game (and created it with the help of One Loop Games) because something like this makes a lot of sense on Vita. It’s also great to see a Sony first party studio working on a tiny, cheaper game that does what so many of us have wanted Sony to focus more on for years: creating a better hodgepodge of big and small titles in order to foster a more diverse ecosystem.Now, just because Uncharted is one of Sony’s most popular franchises doesn’t mean Fight For Fortune is for you. Conversely, if you don’t like Uncharted but like a good round of Magic: The Gathering (or, as I used to play way back in the ‘90s, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game), then Fight For Fortune warrants a look. You shouldn’t go in expecting to be blown away, but the game will certainly keep you happily occupied, with plenty to do and even more to unlock.The first thing that stands out in Fight For Fortune – and what makes it so appealing – is that it’s fundamentally easy to learn, but equally rife with depth. Games like this often have a daunting façade, where intricate rules need to be learned and digested. But Fight For Fortune does a nice job of easing you into the experience with a tutorial that gives you the tools you need to figure out the game’s nuances for yourself. I went from completely puzzled to being on the road to adeptness in all of 15 minutes.A player begins by selecting a card to place down in one of five slots. These cards are drawn from three “factions” (Hero, Villain and Mercenary) and have a specific cost to play, as well as offensive and defensive statistics. Things get a little more complicated when it comes time to begin hoarding treasure in order to utilize cards that will augment the stats and skills of cards that have already been played. For instance, you can buff-out a card’s offense or defense, give them special abilities and more, but that costs treasure that you have to accumulate over rounds. And hoarding treasure often requires taking risks, affixing valuables to at-risk cards until they can be banked.All of this preparation culminates in Fight For Fortune’s dual approach in terms of the game’s goals. You need to fight your opponent’s cards, but you also need to fight your opponent himself (or herself), placing greater emphasis on having more cards actively played than the person on the other side of the digital table. You do damage to cards to get rid of them, and when there’s nothing standing in between your card (or cards) and an opponent, you do damage directly. Usually – especially when playing against the AI – you’ll be tasked with taking your foe’s health down to zero before he (or she) can do the same to you. Deciding when and how to do this is where the game picks up its pace and becomes really fun; it’s all based on risk/reward, and playing your hand too soon can blow up in your face just as easily as it could pay out in spades.Fight For Fortune does have its deficits, however. Load times can be heinously long, especially when starting the game up or navigating menus. Brief in-between-round loading also breaks up the flow a bit. The AI often makes puzzling decisions; if the AI blunders a choice – which it will do from time to time – you can actually see your path to victory before you’re able to execute on it, with nothing the AI can do about it, taking the game’s excitement down a notch. Then again, the AI can also give you a run for your money. As is the case with many like games, it’s all about the hand you’re dealt (pardon the pun), and how meticulous you are in learning the game’s ins and outs.Flawed and frustrating online play rounds out the package. Asynchronous multiplayer in 2012 continues to mystify me, specifically when it’s the only multiplayer option in a game. Fight For Fortune uses a strange amalgam of the PlayStation Network’s messaging system with some in-game tricks to create a coherent and smooth experience, but you’ll never find yourself in an actual lobby playing with someone live. Bend did a nice job of covering this up somewhat by letting you “wait” for a person to make his or her next move, but it’s not multiplayer in its purest sense. Asynchronous would have been a fine option among more choices, including live play. Then again, you can always play with a friend in person by passing your Vita back and forth, should you so desire.I had two technical issues with the game worth noting as well. I wasn’t able, until right before the review’s publish, to get a random ranked or unranked match to work with the anonymous masses online. I was only able to consistently play online with people on my friend’s list. Investigating on Twitter found that this wasn’t the case for everyone, though it seemed to be a common problem likely created by the game’s servers being unpopulated so early after release. Still, it’s an unfortunate and glaring problem.Fight For Fortune also makes a big deal out of connecting to your Uncharted: Golden Abyss save by making specific cards more powerful in Fight For Fortune depending on what treasures you found and Trophies you earned in Golden Abyss. In a conversation with a Sony Bend employee, in which I playfully accused him of going easy on me, he told me that he could have destroyed me because his cards, syphoning off of his 100% complete Golden Abyss save, were far more powerful than mine. I have a pretty diesel Golden Abyss save myself, but it’s from the imported Japanese version of the game, and so I couldn’t get these perks to work. Either way, this could create some potential balancing problems online.