Star Wars Battlefront II
Forced Force.
Published: March 13, 2006
Wow, they did it. No, really, this is the core Battlefront experience turned portable, and with few -- if any -- real caveats to the overall experience. At least in terms of what the software can offer. The hardware, on the other hand, makes things a little more difficult, as anyone who's tried to make or play a game that needs two axes will tell you. The PSP's analog nub is no analog stick, much less two of them, and as a result the game does suffer a bit.
A compromise was struck in the game, allowing you to swap between a handful of controls. The default moves and strafes with the analog nub, with the face buttons directing the view. A Retro configuration swaps these controls, giving you freelook with the analog nub and movement with the face buttons.
A third option, dubbed Basic, moves both to the analog nub and lets you toggle between them, with the shoulder buttons (L for strafing and R for freelook) which means you can't move and shoot at the same time. Finally, Advanced is the most bizzaro of the bunch, moving looking up and down to the Triangle and X buttons, and still requiring a held button for strafing with the L shoulder button.
Out of the four, the Retro option is by far the most accurate, but anyone who's played shooters for the past six or seven years is going to have a hell of a time trying to get their brain to switch the movement and look impulses. In the end, I stuck with the default, but it was the lesser of four evils.
So yes, the controls are inadequate, but that's hardly the fault of Savage Entertainment, the developers who managed to cram most of Pandemic's console big brother experience down into a go-anywhere format. This means you'll have access to the majority of the levels (13 of 24), the same characters, the same intoxicating see-saw battles and even the same space battles from the PS2 version of the game -- though the ability to sabotage the innards of capitol ships was ripped out, so you're left with just being able to jack the opposing team's rides.
You won't get everything, though, and the two biggest omissions are, sadly, also the ones that the game really needed the most. Savage attempted to fill the void that stripping out online play and the story-driven single-player campaign created, and it did so by offering the rest of the single-player component (including Galactic Conquest Mode), and a local 4-player multiplayer component, which is better than nothing, but if you aren't within a few feet of some friends that have PSPs and a copy of the game, it might as well be nothing.
Challenge Mode, which lets you fight as a Rebel Raider, Imperial Enforcer or Rebel Assassin, is exclusive to the PSP, and it basically assigns arbitrary goals like offing a set number of enemies with a very basic premise (Emperor no like Wookies, kill 50 of them!), but it's no replacement for the story of the 501st becoming Vader's Fist.
Okay, it's not a carbon copy of the console experience in PSP form. It is still damn fun to play, if a little different in aiming and, particularly, pacing. The requirements for gaining control of heroes are a little lower, and the matches themselves are usually over in 5-10 minutes rather than the sometimes epic 30 minute back-and-forth matches of the big brother. That see-saw, does still happen, though, albeit on a more limited scale -- literally, the levels are more pocket-sized versions of the console levels, but everything's pared down in relation, so it works nicely.
A compromise was struck in the game, allowing you to swap between a handful of controls. The default moves and strafes with the analog nub, with the face buttons directing the view. A Retro configuration swaps these controls, giving you freelook with the analog nub and movement with the face buttons.
A third option, dubbed Basic, moves both to the analog nub and lets you toggle between them, with the shoulder buttons (L for strafing and R for freelook) which means you can't move and shoot at the same time. Finally, Advanced is the most bizzaro of the bunch, moving looking up and down to the Triangle and X buttons, and still requiring a held button for strafing with the L shoulder button.
Out of the four, the Retro option is by far the most accurate, but anyone who's played shooters for the past six or seven years is going to have a hell of a time trying to get their brain to switch the movement and look impulses. In the end, I stuck with the default, but it was the lesser of four evils.
So yes, the controls are inadequate, but that's hardly the fault of Savage Entertainment, the developers who managed to cram most of Pandemic's console big brother experience down into a go-anywhere format. This means you'll have access to the majority of the levels (13 of 24), the same characters, the same intoxicating see-saw battles and even the same space battles from the PS2 version of the game -- though the ability to sabotage the innards of capitol ships was ripped out, so you're left with just being able to jack the opposing team's rides.
You won't get everything, though, and the two biggest omissions are, sadly, also the ones that the game really needed the most. Savage attempted to fill the void that stripping out online play and the story-driven single-player campaign created, and it did so by offering the rest of the single-player component (including Galactic Conquest Mode), and a local 4-player multiplayer component, which is better than nothing, but if you aren't within a few feet of some friends that have PSPs and a copy of the game, it might as well be nothing.
Challenge Mode, which lets you fight as a Rebel Raider, Imperial Enforcer or Rebel Assassin, is exclusive to the PSP, and it basically assigns arbitrary goals like offing a set number of enemies with a very basic premise (Emperor no like Wookies, kill 50 of them!), but it's no replacement for the story of the 501st becoming Vader's Fist.
Okay, it's not a carbon copy of the console experience in PSP form. It is still damn fun to play, if a little different in aiming and, particularly, pacing. The requirements for gaining control of heroes are a little lower, and the matches themselves are usually over in 5-10 minutes rather than the sometimes epic 30 minute back-and-forth matches of the big brother. That see-saw, does still happen, though, albeit on a more limited scale -- literally, the levels are more pocket-sized versions of the console levels, but everything's pared down in relation, so it works nicely.