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Call of Duty: Road to Victory Review
Written by Robert Falcon on Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Mostly solid presentation; AdHoc multiplayer; airplane turret sequences.
No online play; weak enemy AI; some really lame glitches.
Call of Duty hasn't really had much of an identity when it comes to handheld play, has it? Sure, there's the N-Gage version, but you might as well dig up an old friend and tell him about the time that he dropped his drawers at a Red Sox game. No one wants to bring up a bad memory. Fortunately, the series now has a good one for the Sony PSP, with Call of Duty: Roads to Victory. The game can't hold a candle to the great console versions due to its lack of a couple of certain things, but first-person shooter fans should like it anyway.
The game spreads across three different campaigns for various American, Canadian, and British armies. They all share the same common enemy- the Nazi plague that is plaguing the country during World War II. The campaign starts out with the American one, right in the middle of the Airborne 82nd brigade. From there, the action heats up, ranging from various on-foot missions where German troops have to be shot at to awesome aerial sequences featuring rotating airplane gun turrets. Yeah, those cool ones that have the pilot sitting in the actual bubble and moving around.
For a condensed presentation, Roads to Victory works pretty well on the PSP. The levels aren't as huge as the ones in the console games, but they're still worth exploring and twisting around to get from checkpoint to checkpoint. Animations look rather cool, and the game never really drops in terms of frame rate or detail. However, it does suffer from a few bugs, most notably soldiers who won't die (even after a headshot) and the occasional collision detection error. How else can you possibly explain bullets going through frickin' walls?!
The multiplayer portion of Call of Duty: Roads to Victory is adequate. We say adequate because it doesn't suck, but the door of opportunity got slammed shut here. The game supports up to six players in AdHoc with a variety of modes, including Deathmatch and variations of Capture the Flag among others. However, Activision promised online play with the game, and it has zero Infrastructure support. Worse yet, Game Sharing isn't an option either, forcing players to have to track down other players who own a copy of the game. That's not to say the multiplayer action isn't worth it, because it is. But it could've been so much better.
At least the controls hold up. Amaze did a nice job here shaping up the control scheme to fit around the PSP. Even the option to "cook" grenades (holding them for a little longer to time the explosion just right) can be found, a real plus for those looking to set up some detonating results. The game does take a backstep with its ease of lock-on, although the option can be turned off. It doesn't change the fact that some of these enemies are dumb as bricks. Bricks that slam into other bricks merely because they don't know how to just sit in a wall, mind you.
Call of Duty: Roads to Victory isn't quite perfect --not even close, in fact. However, considering that the last entry of the series in a handheld form couldn't even hold someone's sweaty jockstrap in a locker room, it's progress. The next game should be even better, with improvements on all accords. For now, this game deserves a look, especially by fans.
