Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a good try, but failure at what could have been a great First Person Shooter.
One of the best things I liked was the ability to pick up weapons. Unlike the previous FPS PSP game, Coded Arms, you can pick up the guns that your enemies drop. Also, the orignal voices from the anime series are here; including the high pitched, lovable Tachikoma.
You can also outfit yourself and your Tachikoma robot before the start of the mission. Theres loads of different weapons, from rifles, SMGs, pistols, and rocket launchers.
However, each one of the weapons is dull and grey, lacking any taste or design. Even guns that should have something alittle extra, like a revolver, don't have animations to keep yourself into the game. The reloading is horrible; Gun tilt sideways, stay motionless, then tilt back up. Any gun of the same type also really feels the same.
Infact, almost every model in the game is horriably designed and executed. The only model that runs smothely and is actully good looking for the PSP is that of the Tachikoma. The main characters look just they were pulled out of the anime, but the frozen, emoationless faces tend to water down the experiance. What makes it worse is the cutscene animations. The characters don't even turn NW or SE, they simply walk forward in that direction. They also move like robots, turning left or right by walking in place.
Any other model, such as those of the enemies, are horriably detailed. The levels are almost as bad, doors being just textures applied to the wall, not even indented like most games. It's hard to find which door you actully have to walk into sometimes. There is also NO destructible environmental objects.
And the gameplay. The controls are fine, I wasn't expecting high quality. I did notice a bit of sluggish reactions, but with the AI difficulty set to max, I still didn't have to worry. The AI is stupid as hell, I can't put it in any other terms. Increasing the difficulty only increases the amount of bullets it takes to kill them, and the number of bullets you take before dieing. The framerate was the worse. I would say during character cutscenes it's running fine. During parts with planes or helicopters, it drops to 8 to 15 FPS. Gunplay can also slowdow, and NORMAL gameplay is running a constant 15 to 20 FPS just looking left and right.
This game was just a total letdown, theres really no use even trying. Even being a fan of Ghost in the Shell, I couldn't even stand to try and complete the game! It's clunky, and repitatave. The story fits the Ghost in the Shell theme fine, but trying to play through the game to find the end? Good luck.