Who would have thought that the easiest way to beat a Jedi is to breed him with the mobility of a tank and the sight radius of a cardboard tube? In Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron, the PSP fork of the once proud series continues on a subpar level with repetitive missions, terrible controls, flaky collision detection, and just a general disregard for everything that should make you “elite.”
Gameplay tries to change things up on you by giving you the ability to go from ground combat, surface vehicle combat, and jump into space to take on Star Destroyers and TIE fighters. Each part of the experience feels incomplete and almost as if the designers got to a “good enough” point and moved on to the next objective. There’s just so much frustration here that you’re likely to break your PSP and its analog nub than come back to the game ever again.
On foot your biggest enemy is the camera, the over the shoulder view that worked so well for games like the latter entries in the Resident Evil series is just plain terrible on the PSP’s tiny screen. In close quarters you’ll spend more time trying to get the camera to focus on the enemy you want to blast than actually killing them, and not having any control over the camera makes everything so much more of a pain that it should be.
The camera isn’t the last of the technical glitches you will see, invisible walls that keep you from traversing through seemingly open openings, terrible collision detection that has you shot through walls, and the enemies uncanny ability to be unseen and unheard until you’re very much dead all make you want to rip the game from the UMD drive and chuck it across the room (or delete the file for all those PSPGo owners).
Even the cutscenes are just reused footage from the films with new narration layered over the top of them. When talking about Tatooine we get the CGI raceway from The Phantom Menace, and how many different times can we play out the Hoth battle? The allure has been completely played out by this point.
There just isn’t enough in this package to make it worthwhile, even to die-hard fans. The story is cookie cutter sibling rivalry, the campaign missions are do, rinse, repeat ad nauseum, and the technical problems kill any saving grace that the multiplayer mode may deliver. There’s just too much “good enough” work here to be anything more than an average PSP game that’s been there and done that (better) a dozen times over.
