Call of Duty: Roads To Victory attempts to bring Activision's award winning World War II shooter series to Sony's portable gaming platform, and does so with only marginal success. To be fair, it's tough to create a first-person shooter that actually works well on the PSP (many have tried and few have succeeded ) and try as they might, developer Amaze doesn't get the job done. Before we get into the thick of that, let’s talk about what this game is all about..
Call of Duty: Roads to Victory lets you lead American, Canadian, and British troops through 14 levels in some of the most important battles of World War II. The game's story, which is lighter than usual compared to previous CoD games, is told through in-game narrative and briefing screens, but if you're expecting anything epic then you'll be looking elsewhere.
Like previous Call of Duty games you'll spend a lot of your time gunning down Nazi forces and taking on the usual missions objectives. You'll find yourself cleaning out occupied bunkers, planting bombs in key locations, manning stationary weapons against wave after wave of enemy soldiers, and using rocket launchers to take out armor. Roads to Victory does offer one nice new mission objective that's fun - manning a gun on a bomber as it makes a run for a very important target. In this mission you protect the allied squad from enemy planes by gunning them down. This new gameplay addition is a lot of fun that's worth experiencing, but it doesn’t last long enough to elevate the rest of the run-of-the-mill elements. While this mix of gameplay elements coupled with the usual combat tasks are fun, but by the time you get to the end of it all you may tire of it all.
Roads to Victory offers four control schemes to choose from, and there's probably one that will work for every preference.
Roads to Victory's default setup is pretty decent: movement is controlled with the analog stick; looking and aiming is controlled with your main buttons (triangle, square, X and circle); throwing grenades, crouching, and switching weapons is mapped to the D-Pad; and shooting is done with your right shoulder button. The game also makes heavy use of an auto-aim feature which makes it pretty easy to lock onto and dispose of enemies just by aiming in their general vicinity. To say that the auto-aim feature is forgiving is an understatement. This works best with weapons that have a decent range, so short range weapons are often a game of hit and miss with targets, so the system isn't exactly perfect. Complaints aside, the controls do work better than many past shooters that have graced the PSP.
While the controls are good enough to get the job done, there are a few others problems that plague the overall gameplay. For one the AI controlled enemies are about as bright as drugged cattle, often standing in place until you hit a certain distance to "activate them." This means that they often stand there and look stupid. At the other end of the spectrum is enemy fire off the screen that will often kill you before you even get a lock on where it is coming from. Finally, because these are fairly short levels you'll find no checkpoints anywhere in the middle of these levels. This can be a bit frustrating in the more difficult parts of the game because you'll often find yourself having to cover familiar ground and pray that you succeed. Finally the game doesn't support multiplayer, so after you've beat the single player campaigns, you're pretty much done with the game.
Roads to Victory is a good looking game, as PSP games go, despite the fact that it doesn't even come close to what you'd expect on last and current generation consoles or the PC. Perhaps an unfair comparison, but this is after all the first Call of Duty game to land on the PSP. The action on the screen is a lot tamer too - Roads to Victory doesn't have as much action going on like soldiers on the screen, explosions, gunfire, and more. And while the game's visuals aren't awful they are a bit too dark, which makes seeing enemies in some circumstances difficult to see. Thank goodness for auto targeting..
