Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron review

With all the Star Wars games being released, Gamestyle understands that it must be difficult thinking up an original story outside the realm of the movies. With KOTOR it can be described as a prequel to the prequels, Shadows of the Empire was set between the events of Empire and Jedi and so on. This latest Star Wars offering is centred around a group called Renegade Squadron a band of misfits that have been recruited by Han Solo to help defend against the evil empire. The fact that this team was never mentioned in the original movie trilogy is slightly explained though.The story is moved along by excellently hand drawn cut scenes where your character, which following the classic Star Wars tradition has a laughably bad name, Col Serra is talking through a hologram to female listener about the events which happened during in Renegade Squadrons short lived career. It also explains that being the bunch of lowlife scum that they all were, nobody really knew about the team, which is how the game tries to explain why Han Solo pretty much forgot to mention any of this in the movie trilogy. While the Playstation 2 managed to recreate fairly decent battles, the PSP is struggles slightly to create anything with any real sense of scale. During the campaign youll be asked to complete certain objectives, such as protecting Han Solo as he repairs the ship or blow up certain data points while killing anyone that you come across, but there are a distinct lack of enemies to be shot, and with infinite respawns it becomes quite a walk in the park. Of course, the problem with the game being so easy is that it can be completed in about 2 hours or less, depending on your skill. It's obvious that this really was developed as a multiplayer focused game, which is disappointing for those wanting more of a single player experience. What there is of the single player is quite enjoyable though. The world may seem a little barren and even the vehicular combat is a little stale, most people will actually opt to go on foot rather than use the assortment of vehicles at your disposal, but what is good about the game is the way you can now customise your character with an assortment of weapons and upgrades. At each command point you capture you can enter a menu and using a points system either tool yourself up with some hugely powerful weaponry or upgrade your character with increased health or stamina. Yes, it has its problems. The AI is dreadful and there are various sound glitches (it will often cut out for a second), but we did get a kick out of fighting alongside Han Solo and having a short battle with Darth Vader (who can simply be beaten with a pistol). Controls also surprised us with there easy nature. Controlling Col Serra with the analogue nub can feel cumbersome at times, but the auto aiming feature and camera angles help immensely. The controls of the X-Wings and other space craft are also quite good and make the space battles far more fun than we expected.In order to lengthen the single player thrills a Galactic Conquest mode has been added. Playing more like an RTS you take turns in managing your resources before conquering planets by capturing all of the control points. When doing so you earn resources which then can be used to buy additional characters from the movie saga. This is really more of a side attraction as if you wanted an RTS there are far better examples out there. It's safe to say the majority of the eggs have been placed in the multiplayer basket. Multiplayer being fantastic and easily one of the best examples on the PSP with a great selection of modes and it handles 16 player battles with relative ease.For fans of the first two Battlefront games there is plenty here to enjoy. The single player is a limited experience which will disappoint most, but for those with access to the online features then Renegade Squadron is well worth the asking price.