Great! Fantastic! Not perfect!

I already own this game because Blockbuster put it out early where I live. Apparently this has been happening a lot. I've had it for two days now.

Here's my basic impressions now that I'm roughly halfway through the game.

The graphics are only alright, not fantastic. I've not been wowed by anything in this game, and usually I'm impressed by what can be pulled off on the PSP. That said, they aren't bad either. If you think of the PSP as a portable system and not a mini-console, then I doubt you will have a problem with the graphics.

If you don't like repetitive gameplay, then you may want to wait for a price drop to play this one. I'm not saying that the game isn't fun, but it basically boils down to, wait for the enemies to stop shooting, then start shooting them. And because the auto aim takes care of aiming for you, and the auto ducking takes care of ducking for you, it largely comes down to pressing and unpressing the right trigger button. What makes up for the simple gameplay is the interesting weapons. Some weapons, like the sniper rifle and the Laark rocket launcher don't have auto aim, but have other ways of getting around the lack of a second thumbstick. And all weapons have primary and secondary fire modes, so it makes the pop and shoot play more fun.

I've spent a bit of time in online mode, but not a lot. There's hardly anyone there. I'm hoping that's because most people don't have it yet, though I should be able to play against the Europeans. What I've played has been fun, though because of the lack of people to play against I've had to wait up to ten minutes for a match to start because the host wants the queue to be full. To get around this I decided to host my own match and just start it when there were a few people in the game. Some people dropped out and the match ended up being mostly running around an empty level just trying to find someone to shoot. Also, playing with auto aim pretty much means the victory goes to the person with the bigger gun, not the more skilled player. Some people might be okay with this as it evens things out, but others will just get mad about it. Luckily the host can turn the auto aim off. Then you're only faced with the frustration of trying to aim with the face buttons. But we all did it with Golden Eye, and though it is definitely less precise than dual analog, you get used to it after a while. And everyone has the same handicap, so you really can't complain.

I don't have a PS3 so I can't try out the connectivity things, but I tried to answer some of the questions I saw posted up here. Hopefully this helps some of you to make the decision.

I should point out that I love this game. I highly recommend buying it if you've been itching for a good PSP game. I think it's about as good as a game will get without a second analog stick and better graphics capabilities. I mostly wrote this to give balance to the nearly worshipful reviews I've been reading. It is great. As good as anything I've played on PSP, better than some things I've played on 360 or Wii. But it's not perfect.