Medal of Honor: Heroes for PSP Reviews & Ratings by IGN

The first-person shooter genre has never found a comfortable home in handhelds. Whether on the DS or PSP, the lack of an ideal control scheme, like that on consoles or the PC, has derailed most every effort. Developers will keep trying, though, and if their latest efforts are any indication, it shouldn't take much longer. Just look at Medal of Honor Heroes for the PSP. The first Medal of Honor game for Sony's handheld just happens to be the best first-person shooter on the system.





No ifs, ands or butts about this one. As far as this editor is concerned, Heroes has set a new standard for portable first-person shooters. It has a number of issues, a few of which can irritate quite a bit, but when put into perspective they all seem rather small. It says a lot about a game when its highpoints do a great job of excusing, maybe even hiding its blemishes. Such is the case with Heroes. More importantly, it's simply an impressive effort. Moving such a beloved and cinematic franchise to the PSP may sound like a bad idea - how could developers offer an experience worthy of the franchise with only a fraction of the processing power?





Well, they did. Everything that makes the series so popular survived the translation. This goes for the highly cinematic gameplay down to the multiplayer component - it's enough to make the older Medal of Honor games welcome Heroes to sit at the adult table. Previous iterations received a respectful nod for making the effort - and Heaven knows technology has stood in their way - but Heroes looks, sounds and plays like a true Medal of Honor game. And that's really the simplest way to put it. Having said that, developers made a few design choices that get in the way of Heroes being an even better game. Nothing huge, but they're noticeable - especially to longtime fans of the series.





A majority of these changes deal with the pacing of the single-player campaign. In an effort to make Heroes a portable-friendly product, developers trimmed a little of the depth seen in previous efforts. This has nothing to do with how the game works or how players interact with the gameworld, but how missions themselves pan out. Developers intentionally made each mission, and therefore the objectives in them, straightforward and very brief. Where the missions in earlier games could take upwards of 45 minutes to complete, players can finish each mission in Heroes in less than 20 minutes. Remove the secondary objectives and the time hovers right around 10 minutes. This works remarkably well when traveling, and really, that's the whole point behind the decision, but it's easy to miss those longer assignments.





The story unfolds in linear fashion with players jumping into the boots of three American heroes. Each soldier has five missions to his name, and each soldier fights in a different part of Europe. Like most Medal of Honor games, there's a mission briefing at the start of an assignment detailing objectives and their importance to the war effort. These briefings also serve informative tidbits about the personalities of each hero. They don't do an overly great job of it, however - none of the three soldiers ever comes off as a real person, just a name and a rank. Sure, it's a small complaint, but the title itself implies special recognition to the heroes of the war, so it would have been nice to get to know the soldiers throughout the campaign.





That aside, each mission brims with action. Heroes does an excellent job of recreating the intensity of the WWII-era firefight. More than anything else in the game, it's the one thing developers needed to get right and thankfully they just about nailed it. Most of the credit goes to how the game controls. Charging through a chaotic battlefield or navigating a crumbling European town feels natural -- even without a second analog stick. Heroes lets players choose a bunch of different control figurations, each of which caters to a different kind of gamer. One of them tries to appease the PC crowd by letting players look around using the analog stick, while another goes the Coded Arms route, meaning it uses the face buttons to control the view.





Whatever the preference, they all work well. It would have been nice to fine-tune the aim assist feature manually, but it's not a huge gripe since it generally does a good job on its own. It helps just enough to hit those targets when a player's aim is a little off, but it never feels like cheating or overly sensitive. As for aiming, the options menu has a sensitivity bar, but even on the highest setting it never comes close to using a traditional mouse. Still, it works just fine in this case. Players can use all the action commands they've come to expect from the series, such as sprinting, crouching and peering around corners.





It's also possible to shoot from undercover and zoom in on targets while running, even with standard machine guns and rifles. When it comes to planting explosives and other mission-specific actions, it's all context-sensitive. This helps keep the focus on killing Nazis and not on the technical aspects of war. Ridding the world of Nazis with firearms takes priority over everything else in a videogame anyway.





As satisfying as the firefights are in Heroes, the game could use a little more variety when it comes to missions. As stated previously, developers kept things simple in hopes of streamlining the game. Their plan worked - it just worked a little too well. Most of the time players will run through a map, acquire a few items and then proceed to an extraction point. Players will leave a trail of dead Nazis in their wake, which is fantastic and fun, but a little more depth would have gone a long way. The maps in the game could be more intricate as well, though in their current state they work just fine. These little gripes hardly get in the way of a player having fun, but again, they're noticeable to fans of the series.





After tearing through the campaign, players can head into Skirmish mode for deathmatch-like bouts against computer opponents. This mode comes in handy when time is allusive but the need to vanquish Nazis is great. It lets players jump into one of sixteen maps, choose a time limit and number of opponents, then jump in and start blowing people away. It's actually a fun and very convenient way of getting in some action when very pressed for time. As a final note, Skirmish incorporates all the outfits unlocked during the campaign. So if the need to run around like a Nazi in his pajamas is strong, then by all means, don the long johns and head out to do evil work.





If the singleplayer portion of Heroes lives up to its PC heritage, then the multiplayer component more so. The first and most noticeable aspect of playing with other gamers is the fact it's possible to play with 31 of them. That number squashes every other multiplayer effort on the PSP, offline and online. More surprising is the fact the game retains a solid framerate with 30 would-be soldiers running around. It stutters here and there, like any game, but overall most online matches run smoothly. There are also a good number of modes to choose from. It has six types ranging from deathmatch and domination modes to exclusive modes like Hold the Line and Infiltration.





The former has players defend territory from opponents, while the former sees players navigate into enemy compounds. Then there's Demolition mode, which calls for the destruction of specific enemy targets by the placing of explosives. What's more, players can join (or leave) at any time during a match without interrupting other players. In other words, it's in the upper tier of games available to play online on the PSP. This is a coveted space held by the likes of Killzone: Liberation and Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror. But those games will need to make some room because Heroes most definitely qualifies to stand among them.







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