Call Of Duty: Roads To Victory
PSP
Activision


Gah! What a pile of crap 'Call Of Duty: Roads To Victory' is!

The game starts off looking very promising. For a PSP game, it looks and sounds great. They get around the limitations of the PSP by playing video footage of the war rather than using in game engine to show you the horror of war in the title screen. The sound they get out of the usually tinny speakers is quite phenomenal and has the visceral impact of the Call Of Duty games. So right from the beginning it looks and sounds like a Call Of Duty game and puts you right in the middle of the horror that was World War II.

But the horror of the war gets quickly replaced by the horror of the game itself. When will developers learn that mapping the camera to buttons on the PSP in a First Person Shooter is wrong wrong WRONG!? It's a horrible way to get around the fact the PSP only has one joystick-like control, because it leaves you with a jerky camera that makes it impossible to aim. Sure, the developers put in an auto-aiming function that snaps your look to the nearest enemy, but this feels cheap and makes the game too easy.

I couldn't get past the horrible controls to enjoy all the features promised in the game, such as vehicles and aircraft, but if they were controlled in the same way I wouldn't have a PSP left because I would have hurled it at the wall in frustration with the controls. I shudder to think how multiplayer would run - it would be a game of simply pointing and hoping the auto lock was engaged. Even if you own no other console, and simply must play a Call of Duty game, I couldn't recommend this.

Julian Cram