Coded Arms

"The Internet Crashed On This Game"

You finally bought a PSP and showed it off to your friends, but after hours of Lumines, the system didn't have any other must-haves. When you heard of the new first-person shooter coming out from Konami known as Coded Arms, you must be jumping for joy, and you've been waiting a while to its release date to enjoy a fun FPS. But sadly, you'll have to keep waiting. Coded Arms is the PSPs first FPS game, but unfortunately it doesn't live up to its hype. With irritating controls and a bunch of other problems, this shouldn't be on your list of wants.

The story is fairly interesting, with a Virtual Military Training Program going insane and started taking over the internet. Instead of fixing the problem, the government decides to quarantine it. But then some entrepreneurs come along and enter the hostile internet and destroy some of the baddies found inside. They then take the rare files and sell them on the black market. You are one of the entrepreneurs.

But the thing is, during the game, you don't collect any rare files or anything of that sort! You basically run in, destroy everything you see, and run out. You don't collect anything! Wonder how your character makes his way through life.

The controls are inaccurate and clumsy. The game assigns moving forward, backward, and sideways to the analog stick, while turning is assigned to the face buttons. The game does offer a auto-aim feature, but when you move when you're locked onto an enemy, the reticle goes back to the middle of the screen, so you have to re-line your shots.

At least the game tries to avenge this fault with allowing you to customize the controls in almost any possible way. But it took me a while to find one that I liked, so good luck to you.

Once you begin to start the game, you shoot enemies mindlessly. And the enemies are mindless, too. Once you enter a room with enemies in it, they just stand there and shoot you with whatever they got. The enemies do vary from flying robots to bugs to soldiers. But the enemies are incredibly stupid to begin and end with.

The environments are crap, also. The game is a dungeon-crawling straight to finish, which are all a bland color with absolutely nothing of interest to look at. The game does include randomly generated levels, but they all looks the same no matter what.

What is incredibly stupid is that after you defeat the last boss and beat the game, it takes you back to the title screen. No ending, no reward, nothing! At least Dead to Rights: Reckoning had cheats to keep the game interesting.

For all its faults, Coded Arms looks incredibly good. Detailed 3D characters, very pretty lighting, but bland environments. Even if the game is fairly terrible, the visuals are spectacular.

The sound is fairly good with techno music all the way through it.

The multiplayer in the game is fairly good. You can play with four friends in Deathmatch or Last Man Standing modes. It's kind of a disappointment that the game doesn't feature Infrastructure online modes. There is only one major fault, it might be difficult to persuade your friends to buy this game seeing how poorly it is doing.

After you play this game, you wonder if FPS games are even possible on the one analog nub PSP. But no matter what the future holds for the PSP, this game shouldn't be played at all.

+Good Graphics
+Good Multiplayer
+Adjustable Controls
-But If You Don't Have The Patience, You're Stuck With Crap Controls
-Boring Environments
-NO PLOT!
-Repetitive

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/05