SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals Fireteam Bravo for PSP Reviews by Gamers

The SOCOM series is one of Sony's most important first-party franchises, in part due to its tendency to push the boundaries of the PlayStation 2's online capabilities. It helped launch the Network Adapter a number of years ago, and moved USB headsets into many more homes than likely any other game could have. With the PSP, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo is set to really push the boundaries of what the PSP can do online, again making the series a groundbreaker.

Though Fireteam Bravo can be counted as the little brother to SOCOM 3, being as it contains many of the same features as said game but in a slightly less robust manner, it does an excellent job of keeping up the same production values as its console counterpart. The excellent menu system is virtually identical, the cutscenes and voiceovers stand toe-to-toe with SOCOM 3's excellent segues and the game generally upholds Zipper's attention to high-quality production.

As SOCOM made its way to the PSP, Zipper had to change things up a bit in Fireteam Bravo in order to make it work well on the system. For starters, as there's only one analog stick, you're unable to use one stick for strafe/movement and the other for freelook. As such, the single analog nub is generally used for moving forward and backward and looking left and right, with the L button allowing you to strafe. A tap of the right directional button will set you into freelook mode, which somewhat limits your movement. The biggest change in the control scheme and overall design of the game is that when you're not in freelook (or similarly, zoomed in), the R button will allow you to lock onto an enemy.

The tradeoff between the different firing types brings up a few interesting bits of strategic play. Using the lock-on mechanism, it's really easy to just pick out an enemy and open fire. Depending on your movement and stance, you'll be more or less accurate, but using freelook or using your scope will allow you the most accuracy at the cost of movement. While the more casual players will likely stick with the lock-on system, as it's the easiest to adopt, some of the more dedicated players will likely shift over to using freelook and relying on the L button to strafe to navigate levels. It'll be interesting to see how many players prefer which scheme online in the long run, as even through the singleplayer campaign we shifted back and forth between the three modes over and over again.

Hardcore fans of the series will certainly note that the lock-on system does change the overall "feel" of SOCOM a bit though, and not only does it dumb it down slightly, but it makes the act of hunting down the enemy a fair bit simpler. By pressing the R button, you'll lock onto any enemy within your weapon's range, or if someone is out of range, you'll get a message for that. Either way, you don't need to actually see someone in front of you in order to target them, so you can cruise about the world constantly tapping the lock-on button in order to track down enemies. Even if you intend on zooming-in to pick off a target, you can use the R button to lock on and then when you zoom, you're already targeted at the enemy's body. It makes the whole deal of finding enemies, setting up and picking them off a little simpler, which some folks may not like so much.

Still though, Zipper did an excellent job of moving the console version's reasonably complicated control scheme over to the PSP's "limited" button layout. Once you've gotten everything down, it's simple to cruise about a level, set up and take out an opponent without having to fight the controls or look at the system to try and remember how everything works.

On a cool side note, Fireteam Bravo allows you to adjust the analog stick's dead zone area, essentially letting you make it more responsive than it normally is. If you set the dead zone too low you'll find the game tends to read small movements that you aren't inputting, but you can definitely set it lower than it defaults to (which seems to be where every other game has it set internally) and find that the analog nub is more responsive as a result. It's a handy-dandy option, and one we wish was in practically every other game in existence, especially driving games.

Online

Fireteam Bravo is easily the most fully-featured online game on the PSP yet. The game allows for 16 players, both via Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure mode, and runs quite well in either. We didn't see much in the way of lag at all, which is great stuff. It also features the same menu and lobby system as SOCOM 3, which is to say it's simple yet robust.

There are a dozen maps with five different play modes available, though some maps only allow for a few of these modes as they aren't ideal for everything. The five modes cover a fairly large number of play types, ranging from Suppression (simply eliminate the enemy) to Extract, where you have to move hostages to an extraction point, to various demolition and last-man standing-based modes. It's a great mix that should keep players busy nailing down techniques for each of them. Obviously, the longevity for each of the modes will be seen once players figure out every nook and cranny in the environments and dial in every trick in the book, but from our time with the game, everything seems to have been balanced well enough that there should be a whole ton of playtime to be had with Fireteam Bravo online.

The effect of simplifying things via the lock-on aiming system makes its way into multiplayer as well, obviously. The end result is that the game is still heavily based on chess match strategies, where you rush somewhere and get set up for the opposition's attack, but Fireteam Bravo is a little friendlier towards roaming vigilantes than any of the console games. Since you can immediately lock-on to an enemy, and basically automatically scan the area in front of you by tapping the R button, regardless of whether they're hidden or not so long as they aren't entirely behind a solid object, the game doesn't reward stealth as much as its PlayStation 2 brothers.

Regardless, Fireteam Bravo is still fun as hell online, and it's the PSP's best showpiece for its online capabilities yet. For those still wandering what the PSP really is capable of online, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo is it.

Speaking of which (pun intended), Fireteam Bravo features headset support. While it won't officially be announced by Sony for another day or two, it's been one of the worst kept secrets in the industry for a little while now. We were only able to test out the voice support for a short while during our time with the game, but what we experienced was great, so keep an ear out for more info on that in very near future.

Singleplayer and More

The SOCOM series really only began hitting its stride with regards to its singleplayer campaign with the recently released SOCOM 3, which finally featured a compelling story and enough well-produced cutscenes to keep players working through it.

Fireteam Bravo has the same level of quality cutscenes and voiceovers that blanketed SOCOM 3's inter-mission storytelling segments. The CG quality is fantastic, with excellent animation and high-quality models and rendering effects throughout. And as mentioned, the voiceovers are astoundingly good, some of the best in any videogame to date. Like I mentioned in the SOCOM 3 review, everyone is speaking a foreign language of some sort, so I have no idea if what they're saying is real or even acted well in said language, but from my perspective it's absolutely fantastic.

The campaign storyline works players along Fireteam Bravo's missions, most of which run alongside those in SOCOM 3, tying the two games together. Fireteam Bravo begins in Chile however, which is unique to this title alone. The time in Chile is relatively short, but it does well to set up FTB's place in the SOCOM universe.

As you progress through the story's missions, you can find pieces of intelligence, take out radios, take hostages or perform other secondary tasks that'll unlock things in SOCOM 3. Crosstalk, as its dubbed, also works in the opposite manner where doing similar tasks in SOCOM 3 will unlock things in Fireteam Bravo, which range from unlocking extra characters to changing actual mission intelligence, like knowing ahead of time where snipers are located, for example.

There are a whole ton of Crosstalk unlockables that you can transfer between each game, and Zipper has done a whole lot of work with this to tie the two games together. It's still not entirely clear exactly which missions tie into which in either game. It would have been nice if the game essentially told you when to head to the other game so that you could go back and forth in a relatively seamless manner story-wise to get both angles of the story simultaneously, and make best use of the unlockables. This is a relatively minor gripe, however, as realistically swapping between either system every 30 minutes could be annoying, though in theory the story/unlockable progression sounds good.

Fireteam Bravo also features an Instant Action mode, which pits you with five different game types that you can play in any area you've beaten, like Hostage Extract, where you have to get a bunch of hostages out of the level alive, or Stealth Sabotage, where you have to take out enemy markers without being caught. All of the enemy placement is entirely random, allowing you to play through these scenarios over and over and over again without coming across the same setup.

The Instant Action game types are pretty fun and essentially allow you to play your own variations of the singleplayer campaign. If you came across a level in the campaign that required stealth, but you really wanted to go in blasting, this is your chance. It's good stuff and goes a decent way into helping extend the life of the singleplayer aspect of the game, though it's not as fun as playing online and you don't get the sweet cutscenes from the main campaign, so the reward isn't as nice.

One last thing that hurts both the regular campaign and Instant Action modes is that the enemy AI can be very hit-or-miss. When an enemy notices you, it does a very good job of finding cover and generally getting out of the way. Noticing you is the iffy part, however. You can sometimes creep right up on an enemy soldier from the side, clanking down a metal walkway the entire time, and he won't know of your existence until you pop him in the temple with a bullet. Other times, they'll notice you from a distance, but won't bother firing at you for a short while, enabling you to get nicely set up before you take some well-aimed shots. This doesn't plague every encounter through the game, but it does happen reasonably often. It's not enough to kill your entire enjoyment of the game, but it's far from ideal.

Graphics and Sound

Fireteam Bravo isn't the best looking game on the system by any means, but that's due to its rather large level layout. The amount of space that you can cover in a single mission is rather huge, and certainly helps the game's overall great design come to fruition, but it does hurt individual scenes and such a bit.

Most objects in the game are made up with a limited number of polygons, some of which are low enough that they draw reminders of the original Quake. They're not pretty by any means, though they do get the job done. You never really question what anything is, but you're also never really impressed with anything other than the animation quality.

Player models are decent and well modeled, but they're reasonably low-poly. The excellent animation set from SOCOM 3 has worked its way to Fireteam Bravo, with you and your compatriot ducking, climbing, running, sneaking and such all with great animation detail. The enemy has a whole set of death animations as well, and they all look great. Every time you pop a guy in the head and watch his body slink to its final resting place, you feel just a little bit of joy in your belly. It's good stuff.

While the graphics are generally lackluster, the audio is excellent in every aspect. The game's sound effects, music, voiceovers and everything else carry over from the console version, and they stand out even more on the PSP. Gunshots ring loud and clear, with assault rifles sounding about as realistic as we could imagine. The music is phenomenal, even though it does sound like every near-future war game soundtrack in existence. Still, it's excellent.

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