The newest edition to the Star Wars Battlefront genre on the psp puts up a good front, but still seems to fall short.
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Pros: Relatively deep customization, ground to space option makes battles
seem larger, provides exciting gameplay frequently.
Cons: Graphics are not as smooth as they could have been, Space fights
seem rather nerfed, not as much NEW content from previous
game, predictable storyline.
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Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron puts you in the shoes of a soldier in one of the 4 major factions in the Star Wars universe: The Republic, The CIS, The Rebel Alliance, and of course the Galactic Empire. At the beginning of the battle you can chose a loadout from one of the pre-arranged ones or customize your own. The loadouts consist of your soldier's primary and secondary weapons and accessories. While there are a good amount of choices in each category, there is hardly any NEW content at all. You can also chose your soldier's primary and secondary colors for his uniform, and you can chose his race, body type, and insignia. Again, a good amount of choices but not enough NEW content! In fact, that is what is most disappointing about Elite Squadron; hardly any purely new content.
After you've chosen or created a loadout, you spawn at one of your teams commandposts. These are placed at certain choke points in the battlefield. The more you capture, the more points you add to your team score, as well as creating a respawn point for you and your teamates. Obviously the biggest new aspect that Elite Squadron has brought to the series is that now you can jump into a fighter and transition directly into space and back to the ground again all in the same battle. While in space the goal is to get into your opponents capital ship and destroy it. Thats right, you do get to destroy capital ships! Not only does that create a huge explosion but it also will drastically add to your points, it also takes away the space spawn point for your opponent as well as his orbital strike cannon. Speaking of cannons, each battlefield (Space or Ground) has a orbital strike cannon or a ion cannon respectively. The ion cannon is connected to a certain commandpost on the ground and after your team captures it and holds it for a short time is ready to fire. You use the ion cannon to deplete your enemy's capital ship's shields. Once they are down, you or your teammates can fly into it with a starfighter to get to the core and destroy it. The orbital strike cannon is located on your capital ship and must also be charged. It cannot be lost however, since it is not attached to a commandpost. You fire the orbital strike cannon at the ground battle but you can't see individual units or tanks. Instead you can only see the commandposts, so pretty much you just have to fire at the enemy's commandposts and hope that you're doing good damage.
Elite Squadron has 3 singleplayer modes: Campaign, Instant Action, and Galactic Conquest. In campaign mode, you follow the adventures of one of 2 clone twins as they go through the starwars battles and events. While this campaign idea is somewhat original, the way the missions play out is very predictable. Couple this with cheesy voice acting, and mediocre graphics and you have a slightly interesting, short, rather boring campaign. Instant action lets you chose from one of the multiple maps, chose a time era, chose a team, and go at it. Galactic Conquest mode has you chose a time era and team, but then puts you in charge of a system of planets. You use these planets to harbor more units and then to attack other planets with them. The more you have, the more credits you earn, and the more upgrades or units you can buy. This puts a fun, if sometimes challenging strategy and tactical aspect on the game.The game also supports multiplayer ad hoc as well as up to 8 on 8 infastructure matches. In both you are given the choice of Instant Action or Galactic Conquest modes.
All in all Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron is a pretty good game. But thats about it, just a good game and not the spectacular game it should have been. As a sequal it should have had more new content, but as a game on its own it provides a fun and sometimes exciting battlefront game. If you are a fan of the starwars universe, and have never played the previous game Renegade Squadron, then this game is definately for you. If you have played Renegade, then this game is still for you, but don't expect to be blown away by new content. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would give this game a 7.0