Star Wars: Battlefront II PlayStation Portable

Star Wars: Battlefront II PlayStation Portable

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Oct 21, 2006 | 6 out of 6 found this Star Wars: Battlefront II review helpful

Pros: Interface makes for somewhat awkward controls; no

Cons: Looks and sounds great; playable hero characters; space battles.

Battlefront II for the PSP does include the two major new features from its console cousins: playable hero characters and space battles. When you earn a certain number of points in a match, the hero character is unlocked. You're then given the op...tion to respawn as the hero. Only one hero character per side, per match, can exist at any given time, so don't expect to see 12 Yodas running around against 12 Darth Vaders. While this feature sounds fantastic on paper, in practice, the hero characters actually aren't all that interesting to use. Most of them are lightsaber-armed Jedi, so combat involves running up to people and mashing on the attack button quickly to swing your saber. Most Jedi can throw their sabers, and some have Force powers. Certain maps will also let you play special characters, like Boba Fett or Han Solo, who have high-powered guns and other weapons. In general, though, playing a hero doesn't feel quite as epic as you might expect it to. The space battles are much more interesting than the playable Jedi. These space combat maps enable you to jump into small starfighters, fly out of the fighter bay of capital ships, and dogfight in outer space as naval combat rages between massive star destroyers, frigates, and the gnatlike fighters that buzz around them. The sense of scale between the ships is great, as is the rush you get from trying to shoot down other fighters. The best part of the space combat is trying to bring down the huge capital ships. You can attack their vulnerable parts from the outside using larger fighters, like TIE bombers or Y-Wings. Unfortunately, unlike the other versions of the game, the PSP one doesn't let you break inside enemy capital ships on foot to sabotage them from the inside. It's still possible to fly into their fighter bays to steal their fighters, but other than the fighter bay, there are no ship interiors to fight in on foot, which is a big downer. Read more Less