First Light feels so much more fun than Second Son.
Yeah, it is. It feels a lot more focused in the narrative and the collectibles are all for powerups IIRC. The arena stuff is pretty fun, too (though I sucked at that so it took a while to finish.)
I've got 2 trophies left for AC: Liberation. One is to pick up some shrooms around the swamp and the other is to climb 8848 meters. Having beaten the story and done everything in the SP trophies but those two things, I'm at 4500m. It's literally a trophy that everybody grinds mindlessly. The trophy comments all suggest using rubber bands or something and just setting the Vita to run at a wall for a few hours. What a shitty trophy.
Interestingly enough, though there are tons of problems with AC: Liberation not a single one is due to being on the Vita. The game problems basically revolve around some bad design choices, a shitty story, unpatched bugs, and not having a single likable character.
The bad design is the persona aspect, where you switch costumes and can only do some things in a particular costume. The issue with this is that you can be running through missions in one character, go to do the next step of a mission, then get told you have to change costumes. The dressing rooms aren't near as common as they should be so suddenly you have to spend 3-4 minutes running to a dressing room and back just to continue. Some of the collectibles and combat trophies are costume-specific which forces you to backtrack quite a bit in order to do the different tasks. Another issue is the only Vita-specific game element; an annoying hidden message thing where you have to make the Vita camera face a bright light so you can see invisible lettering. It doesn't work well at all and just feels like a gimmick.
The story is just shit. It's completely incoherent and feels pointless. Avaline is not the slightest bit interesting or sympathetic and none of the other characters have any presence or personality at all. There's also no "real world" element to speak of. A good chunk of the story is set in the swamp which has tons of little islands. Some of them have pathways you can free run between, trees and the like, but you'll spend a lot of time wading through water and wishing it didn't take forever to get around, which isn't fun.
I clipped through buildings and such a few times and got stuck. Not a huge deal, though one time I had to exit the game and restart it in order to get out. There were a few occasions where the game just didn't load the next section properly, so I had to go into and out of the menu to get it to resume. The biggest problem by far was the map. For some reason a lot of the collectibles never showed up at all. I've no idea why. I had the latest patch installed, restarted the game, no change. Online videos showed them correctly, but for some reason even when I was right on top of things neither the main nor mini map showed stuff. This made collecting things pretty frustrating.
The trophy list, graphics, combat, etc., all felt just fine. Movement is definitely not as good as AC: Rogue (I've played 1, 2, and Rogue previous to this) but Liberation is an older game so that's to be expected. Framerate can dip but not badly and it doesn't affect gameplay at all.
Some of this stuff may be resolved by the HD version. Not sure. Kinda sucks that the game gets so heavily criticized but is considered poor because of the Vita. The Vita is clearly not the problem with Liberation.