Tearing Into The Magic Of Tearaway

When Tearaway was first revealed in 2012, I was intrigued by what the game was offering. After all, I was a fan of Media Molecule’s previous work with LittleBigPlanet, spending an obscene amount of time exploring various user generated levels, and failing spectacularly in creating my own. However, at the time of the announcement I wasn’t a Vita owner and other games soon grabbed my attention.

Last Friday, I attended EGX and for the first time met some of the TSA staff, as well as some of the lovely members of our community and other great writers from various sites. Much of my time was spent in the company of these guys, but during the early afternoon I found myself wandering the Expo show floor alone, looking for something to play. Most of the big titles had very long queues which I couldn’t be bothered with, and that’s when the Tearaway stand caught my eye, a generally quieter area, so I went to have a play.

I can now say without doubt that Tearaway was my personal game of show. The level I played was one of the earlier ones, acting mainly as a tutorial to the controls and the way the touch input worked, but within a few moments the way the game fit together just felt completely natural, and soon I was immersed.

Tearaway uses all the features that the Vita has to offer, but it was the implementation of touch through the screen and rear panel that was mainly on show. These controls allow you to manipulate different pieces of the game world, from tapping parts of the world using the rear touch panel to make the Messenger bounce into the air and land on a different platforms – at this early stage in the game, you’re not yet able to jump, so Atoi or Iota are entirely dependent on your fingers – to using your fingers to slow down music by stopping the vinyls on a large turntable, which in turn affects how quickly a path opens and closes.

Graphically Tearaway looked nice, with the game’s art style adding its own charm to proceedings. There were a couple of times where I felt my touch input and the action on screen didn’t quite mesh graphics wise but this didn’t detract away from the game. There were also a moment where I wasn’t sure where the path was due to a camera angle, but due to how small that particular area in the game was I found the way forward pretty quickly. With this surely being an old demo and weeks of development still left, these are minor concerns.

In terms of music and audio I thought it was great, especially how it could be affected by interacting with the game. Going back to the portion where music had to be slowed down to cross an area, the speed and pitch of the music was linked to how slowly or quickly you turned the track. Outside this the music flowed nicely adding to the atmosphere, and helping with the immersion. When I had the headphones on I was completely oblivious to the events going on around me, because the sound and action were so well crafted.

My sit down with Tearaway only lasted about 15 minutes but within that time my interest in the game had gone from slight to wanting more. I could tell that Tearaway hadn’t just got its hooks in me either as I watched people of all ages play the game, and saw them smiling at the action on screen and showing each other the touch controls with wonder.

If the EGX demo was anything to go by Tearaway is going to be something very special.