SOCOM: US Navy SEALs - Fireteam Bravo Review

It's certainly not down to a dramatic shift in principles. SOCOM PSP is more of an emulation of SOCOM PS2 than a port, trying to cram as much action into the PSP's spread of buttons and limited processing components as possible and coming commendably close. On the single-player side, there's a reasonable campaign mode that sends you on a tour of various international terrorist hotspots and has you defuse bombs, shadow a few naughty foreigners and bump a fair few of them off while you're at it. There's also something called "Instant Action" that allows you to refill the single-player levels with new objectives and enemies to add to the game-length. Multiplayer, the game's biggest strength, offers a range of good team-based modes and even gets one up on SOCOM PS2 by allowing you to achieve more on your own if the group's full of incompetents - over the Internet as well as ad hoc wireless, with voice comms support through a bundled headset, too.

Graphically SOCOM crams in plenty of detail, and doesn't look too different to the original PS2 game.

Perhaps - if it seems a bit weak then bear with me - it's the lock-on. In the absence of a two-stick system, Zipper has created a control system based around single-stick movement and turning, and an auto-aim using right-trigger. By pressing right on the d-pad you can also use a free-look, which is good enough to help when you need to do a bit of recon, and in order to avoid absolute unfairness Zipper's avoided putting enemies below your line of sight on stairs and things like that. Sensible design. It's by no means a perfect system, but it's good enough - and saddled with things like night vision and zoom and stealth stances to sidestep its shortcomings. In single-player, it also allows you to deal out orders to your squad-mate Lonestar by hitting circle and selecting using a radial, while obvious things (breach, defuse bomb etc) appear and can be activated contextually by holding circle over them. Online, voice comms deals with a scarcity of buttons and a lack of keyboard.

And it's here that the lock-on helps where you'd most expect it to hinder, because instead of simply removing the challenge it arguably intensifies it whilst levelling the playing field. You can still have twitch-kills with the free-look, but most people are using the lock-on, and so it's about positioning, awareness and solid team tactics. With well-designed levels and up to sixteen players in the game at once, staying alive's tricky but the fact that you're not being out-thumbed by somebody who grew up with analog aiming is a definite plus.

Naturally the single-player game benefits from it too, and the range of missions is enough to keep you interested, whether you're taking out critical enemies, rescuing hostages, defusing bombs or reacting to changes in objective by scouting for hidden intelligence or photographing clandestine encounters (although that's a bit of a push, since I'm actually referring to a bit where you follow an elder around a camp and snap him spouting alarmingly straight-faced crush-the-infidel rhetoric to his fellow Generic Arab Terrorists - this is game of wallpaper-narrative and it's best not to look too deep). Whatever you make of the context, the content's engaging - and the game's close relationship with SOCOM 3 means you can unlock things for use in that game and vice versa, as well as seeing that game's events from a different perspective.

Being able to track your and Lonestar's health is useful. Online, you can just run in the direction of the screaming Americans.

So it may be that stuff that I like. It's certainly not the AI though, which is dreadful. Or the checkpointing, which is nonexistent. If Lonestar dies, it's game over - and he's about as smart as a brick. It's also a bit of a pain when you're searching a house for bombs to defuse and you miss one and fail that way, despite evacuating the place well in time and achieving all your other objectives. It's hardly about remaining covert - they'd probably notice all their dead henchmen and missing intelligence.