PSP Minis Review Roundup
by Iain Alexander
Let’s Golf (£3.99)
Anyone who has ever played Everybody’s Golf will know exactly what to expect with Let’s Golf. 63 holes, spread over 4 locations with characters that you can customise with clothes and accessories picked up by winning tournaments. The game itself is split into a handful of different game modes: Instant Play, Hot Seat, Tournament and Free Hole. It’s a nice range of options, letting you spend a few minutes perfecting a hole, have a quick 3-hole game or spend a bit longer on a full tournament. Hot swap allows you to play with friends on one PSP, which works quite nicely too and makes proceedings a little less lonely.
Graphically it’s quite pretty, but falls short of the polished visuals of Everybody’s Golf, and there are moments when your golfer or part of the scenery glitches out of view, but overall it’s solid. The shot control is the fairly standard 3-press-swing used in most casual golf games, and using the d-pad after the shot lets you add spin to the ball, something usually found in the Tiger Woods games. It works well, and can make the difference between hitting the green and rolling into the bunker. Get your timing wrong on the swing (something painfully easy to do) and you’ll scuff the shot and it’ll trickle along the ground, usually into a somewhat unhelpful place.
Let’s Golf won’t keep you occupied for months on end like “full” golfing games will, but that’s not really the point of the PSP Minis. If you want an accessible, fun golfing game without paying out for Everybody’s Golf then it might be just what you need.
3.5/5
Dynogems (£2.49)
Dynogems isn’t a complicated game – the idea is to pick up coloured gems that are moving slowly down the screen, throw them somewhere else and match up groups of 4 or more of the same colour. When matched, the gems vanish with everything else cascading up to fill the gaps, potentially setting off more matches as other gems get put together. You dinosaur can actually carry up to 3 gems of the same colour at a time, so you can put serious thought into which gems need moving and where they need to go to maximise the score. Along the way you get magic to use, which will have a range of effects from clearing an entire column to pausing the gems for a few seconds, but it can only be used once, so just using it immediately isn’t always the best move. In terms of way to play there are 2 games types: a level based mode and the endless mode. The first option requires you to clear a certain number of gems to make progress, and the other obviously just going on and on until your gems reach the bottom of the screen. You’ll soon realise it’s a very cheerful, colourful game, something that kids and adults will both get enjoyment out of.
It’s one of those games have an unexplainable addictiveness to them. On the surface, Dynogems looks too simple to be worth much of your time, with the only objective being to move coloured gems around. Nothing new really, there are hundreds of gem matching games around, so what makes this so different? In truth, I’m not quite sure. It has that je ne sais quoi that makes a game irresistible, maybe it’s the mildly irritating music that you’ll never quite want to turn off, the cute little dinosaur guy you control but forget is even there 30 seconds into the game, or the satisfaction when you clear the screen using a single cleverly placed gem. I’ve no idea, but either way it’s a cracking game, and one of the few Minis that you can actually comfortably play on your PS3 without it looking like a Spectrum game…
4/5
Breakquest (£2.49)
20 years ago, my dad came home with a brand new game for our Spectrum. It was Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh, and it was one of the best games I played on the system. So much so it started my long standing obsession with “Breakout” style games, which carries on with Breakquest. However, this isn’t simply another clone where you just bounce a ball around to smash bricks. The developers have taken this basic formula and added so many bells and whistles that you see Breakquest as its own game, and not just more of the same. Firstly, it’s hard to get the hang of. I mean REALLY hard. In part, this is down to the fact that the bumper that you control has a feeling of momentum, so it starts slowly then gathers pace across the screen which takes some getting used to, although the sensitivity can be changed in the settings which helps. But over and above that, everything on the screen interacts with everything else. Power-ups can collide with the ball making both ping off in a random direction, and blocks will collide with each other and move round the screen.
But this adds to the achievement you feel when you complete a level. Whenever you complete a stage another one gets unlocked, and seeing what is coming up next makes you want to get past the next level even more. And these stages fulfil the entire range of sublime to the ridiculous – want to bash a block-built cow out of the sky? No problem. Want an impromptu game of Space Invaders, complete with dropping aliens throwing bombs at you? It’s all there, and it’ll keep you going for a hell of a long time.
Breakquest is great fun. If you’ve played these games before, then it adds enough new ideas to make it worthwhile. If you’ve never seen one, then it’ll be a tough but rewarding introduction to the genre. Either way, for £2.49 you really can’t go wrong.
4.5/5
Pinball Dreams (£3.99)
Most young people nowadays won’t have played on a real pinball machine, so when a pinball game appears you want it to have variation, realism and give the same satisfaction of the real deal. Pinball Dreams goes some way towards that, but doesn’t quite hit the buttons to elevate it above Gottlieb Pinball Classics. The biggest problem is that you only get 4 tables to play on, and they’re quite simple in design. It’s not a bad game by any stretch – those who are new to pinball will find things a bit easier going due to there being less to think about, and the ability to flip the tables 90° to give a more complete view of what you’re doing is a helpful addition. On top of that, if you’re after something which will entertain you on the train to work for the next couple of weeks then it’s a pretty good bet as most games won’t go on for any more than 10 or 15 minutes. Another nice touch, which is absent from Gottlieb, is the ability to play any of the tables straight away so you’ll be able to dive into a game playing whichever theme you’re interested in.
So you can tell from what I’ve said so far that it’s not a bad game by any stretch, and if it matched the lower price of some of the other minis then I’d be recommending it without a second thought, but with Gottlieb available on the store for a few quid more with its bigger range of authentic tables I’d be tempted to go for that.
3/5
Fieldrunners (£3.99)
Tower Defence games have become something of a craze. You won’t find a console without one available, and wander onto any flash games website and you’ll have several to pick from, so it takes something extra to stand out from the pack and be worth your pennies. Luckily for you PSP owners Fieldrunners has landed on the PSN store, and it’s a cracker. For those of you unfamiliar with tower defence games the idea is simple: stop the baddies/helicopters/machinery/elephants from getting from their entrance points to their goal. If too many get through, it’s game over. As with most games of this genre, Fieldrunners offers a range of towers to combat the onslaught and choosing the right tower in the right spot is key to your success.
But what makes fieldrunners special? There are a few things. Firstly, it’s insanely easy to pick up and play, and even total novices will be up and running in no time, but if you know what you’re doing you can just crank up the difficulty and you’re instantly given a much greater challenge. It’s also something you’ll be wanting to revisit several times to try out new game modes, maps and towers. After beating each level you unlock the next until all 5 are available, but you also gain an Extended game mode which ups your choice of towers from 4 to 6, giving you even more toys to play with, and the Endless option which carries on non-stop until you let too many through. The later maps are also quite tough too, with enemies appearing in more places as time goes on. The only minor let down is when you zoom in fully when you’ll see the graphics getting a little undefined round the edges, but you’ll probably spend most of your time zoomed out anyway so it’s no big deal.
So whether you’ve tried a tower defence game or not, I’d whole heartedly recommend Fieldrunners. For £4, you’re getting a whole lot of game for your money.
4.5/5
Kahoots (£2.49)
Kahoots has been compared by many people to the classic Lemmings, but I’m not at all sure I agree. True, Kahoots is a puzzle game with a main character that wanders aimlessly until it reaches its destination or gets killed, but the similarities end there. The idea behind Kahoots is to swap floor tiles around which will allow your Kahoot to avoid deadly spikes, drop through trapdoors and jump onto higher levels all the while trying to collect cake on the way to the exit. It’s not essential for you to collect the cake, but it gets extra points and rewards you with a cry of “yay, cake!” or something similar from your squeeky-voiced little friend. It sounds annoying, but it’s actually quite cool. Before long you meet the Cardborg – an enemy in the form of a walking cardboard box that you need to keep away from your Kahoot. Luckily, when a new game element is introduced the bizarre looking Pegbeast sings you a song about how it works before the level starts. If you don’t want to hear the whole song, you can cancel it which makes the Pegbeast apologise to you in a very posh accent. Small touch, but very neat. And that’s what Kahoots is all about, funky little things such as how your guy gets killed – the screen freezes, and your dude gets circled in pen and the word “fail” scribbled next to it.
But the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts and all this adds up to an adorable, but mentally challenging game which will tax even the sharper of brains. £2.49 doesn’t buy you much at the moment, but it now buys you one of the best Minis on the store. Individuality is rare in games nowadays, and Honeyslug should get a hearty pat on the back for having the balls to do something a little different.
4.5/5
Fortix (£3.49)
The premise of Fortix is fairly straightforward. As a knight, you need to capture areas of a map by walking from your “baseline” (the white line surrounding the map) and boxing in the area you wish to take control of with the aim on controlling all of the forts on the map. As you’re doing so dragons, canons and blood bats will try to attack you, although you can capture these as well if you’re quick enough. You work your way through a series of levels, presumably intended to get harder as time goes on. The game does get tougher with enemies increasing in number and speed, but there’s an inevitable and crucial problem with this sort of game: once you work out a specific strategy (which I won’t reveal here) the game becomes extremely easy, even on the “Impossible” difficulty setting. After playing it through on the Normal setting, I tried again on Impossible using the method I’d found, and got through the entire game in just short of an hour. And it’s not as if the ending sequence is worth the effort, it’s just a screen with a congratulations message.
It’s a shame really, because a few tweaks could make this game quite fun – the ideas are certainly there. Sadly, it just doesn’t fit well together and you’ll play it for an hour or so with no desire to go back and do it again. For this price, it’s not impressive.
2/5
Heracles Chariot Racing (£3.49)
Aimed squarely at the Mario Kart market, Heracles Chariot Racing is a cartoony racing game based on a range of mythical characters racing around 5 locations. The main section of the game is based around the Championship mode, where you begin by challenging for the Bronze trophy, then onto Silver and Gold. Nine characters are available, each with individual combinations of speed, handling, acceleration and weight which make a significant difference in how your races pan out. Along the way you’ll pick up speed boosts and weapons which can be used to lay traps for your competitors or directly attack them in any direction, and there are a range of hazards already on the track for you to avoid at top speed. See why I opened with the Mario Kart reference?
Once you get into the game, it’s quite fun. The racing itself is quick, but at times a little too unforgiving for the casual gamer that this would appear to be made for. Even if you’re comfortably winning a race, if you fall off the track or run into a snake you’ll generally end up near the back of the race which is a bit annoying when you’ve spent 3 laps at the front. The biggest problem though is the lack of depth in the game. Once you’ve won each tournament, there’s very little to keep you going back apart from beating your own times in the Time Attack mode, but that won’t last long. It’ll keep you occupied for a couple of hours, but when you can get a lot more entertainment out of some of the other Minis available, it doesn’t quite seem enough.
3/5
