All this week, the writers of PS Fanboy will share their impressions of Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron. Make sure you come back every day, as we'll be giving away five limited edition Darth Vader PSP-2000 systems.
I'll be quite frank: this is the first time I've played a
Star Wars game on my own time since
Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64. It was bitchin', sure, but I only played stuff like
Knights of the Old Republic on a friend's system. Before
Shadows, I think the only other
Star Wars game I had was on the NES -- it was hard. Very hard. So, unlike Andrew and Colin, I have no prior experience with the
Battlefront franchise, so its move on PSP is less of a surprise to me, more of ... an initiation into something fantastic.
I don't know why Andrew and Colin are so dismissive of the controls -- maybe they're used to something completely different, but as a
Battlefront virgin, I found my cherry popping experience delightfully intuitive. [
Wow, strong imagery there! - Ed.] The basics are this: you don't move your cursor around -- you press and hold the R trigger to lock onto nearby enemies. The longer you lock, the stronger your shot. When you're locked, instead of running, you strafe. I think you can cycle through enemies with the D-pad during a lock-on, but I'd just tap the R trigger and move onto the next closest target. Actually, you know what, the controls are
exactly like
Mega Man Legends. Maybe that's why I love them.
I wasn't fond of the vehicles. No real reason, but the larger ones got stuck a lot and controlling your aim was more cumbersome than rewarding. Leave the vehicles for your AI peons to handle as you wreck an enemy stronghold all by your lonesome. This is especially true in the Galaxy Conquest mode, which I'll be chatting about for the remainder of this impression.