Yes, I'm sad to say that the most recent incarnation of my favourite game series, star wars battlefront, has been another lousy addition to the downward spiral of lackluster sequels to the series.

A friend managed to get me a copy of it yesterday to play on my newly modded PSP, and having played it for about 5 hours now, I have yet to see any vast improvement from the previous title, Renegade Squadron. It just seems to be missing a serious ammount of things that made that game half decent, like the addition of hero space ships and enhanced ground combat, From what I can see in instant action mode, you get the same map layout repeated about 12 times (cuz thats all the levels there are, just 12 playable levels...) with a tiny star destroyer knock-off on one side, and a nebulon frigate on the other side (the ship luke has his hand repaired on at the end of episode V)

Really, they ain't capital ships, neither are they controllable (they DID however modify the insides of the ships, so they're not all the same a la BF2) but nothing inside can seriously be destroyed, damaging the engines on the outside does nothing internally, you can only KO the 'core' of the ship once inside, which is just and upside down command post that can explode.

You can only ' play' with a rather low res orbital strike cannon (inverted ion cannon) which can 'shoot' targets down on the surface...only from what I've played you can kinda just shoot the surface, targets that can be hit from orbit don't show up on your mini map, but other than that you just get a lil ' poof' explosion and nothing else, no MASSIVE blast and destruction from a powerful orbital cannon, just a lil speck of explosion.

The same for the ion cannon on the surface, there is only 1 target in space to shoot at (the sub-capital ship) and you can only destroy its shields, you have to get up off your bum and fly back into space, trudge back through the ship and blow the 'core' again, see how this is getting a bit repetative? Sorry fantasy fans but you won't be dreaming up any ingeniuos ways to take out capital ships in this game, just the same ol sequence of shields, space, shoot and escape. There arn't any mini frigates to blast to pieces with your cannons, no transports to test your marksmanship on, just a big, stationary, blurry triangle.

In another letdown, there are ONLY 2 types of ship in the game for the factions in instant action, just X-wings and clone LAAT's for the rebels, Tie fighters and shuttles for the empire, V-wings and LAAT's for the clones, and finally Droid fighters and MAF's for the Droids. I can't actually believe this right now, but they have DOWNGRADED all the ships that renegade squadron strove to include. No A-wings, no B-wings, no Y-wings no Tie interceptors, no Tie Bombers, Tie defenders, tri fighters, Trade federation bombers, jedi starfighters, ARC-170 fighters...etc...

They have also failed to include any interesting vehicles for the heros in the game, all the 'new' heroes get are shiny basic fighters that fly faster and shoot harder. Such as lando calrissian and admiral ackbar, they just get a stupid X-wing. Darth maul won't be getting his cool sith infiltrator, he just gets a shiny droid fighter. The only slightly interesting ships in the game are Boba Fett's slave 1 and obi wan's jedi fighter. I can't even find the millenium falcon yet, I'll be SO mad if they've made it a story only ship.

I can see by now your probably getting the picture, and to sum up, all this new game brings to the saga is a repeat, lite version of renegade squadron, complete with a new shiny shiny transition system (which, basically is summed up on the demo available to download from the PSN if anybody has played it, thats ALL you get, repeated over 12 maps, the same thing which is very unsatisfying)

And that new story lucasarts keeps bragging about? lets just say a linear, 12 mission, 5 minute to complete each story platform game is the thing we would have found exciting about 5 years ago when the first battlefront was released (and yes, I'd definetly reccomend you to go play that if you want a good battlefront game) not really an AMAZING thing in 2009 when we have vast exploring games like GTA available for PSP, exciting HD fast racing games such as wipeout pulse, novelty cute puzzle games such as locoroco etc, the PSP is a powerful system, and this abomination of a game has severly shunned the capabilites of it in favour of dodgey story cutscenes that would look right at place in a PS2 game, not a next gen handheld.

On a final note, I've very dissapointed with lucasarts, rebellion and this game, how could they take out so much stuff and not replace it? if anybody out there owns this game too, did I just get the one that they didn't include all the items on? or are they all cleverly hidden in some unlockable form? because I certainly don't have a clue...