Three OSS operatives carry the campaign across the European theatre: a sergeant fighting through Italy, a lieutenant in the Netherlands, and another lieutenant holding the line in Belgium and the Ardennes, each told through pre-mission briefing text. The anthology structure interleaves three operations (Avalanche, Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge) of five short, objective-dense missions each, and the epilogue closes on a war-over register that lands despite the minimal production. The tone is affectionate rather than epic, and the briefing-text framing keeps the story from ever overstaying. It is a compact war anthology that knows exactly how much narrative a handheld shooter needs.
The total absence of in-game music is the defining oddity. The entire soundscape is gunfire, shouts and the occasional explosion, an immersion-first choice that plays as a hole rather than a statement, and the absence sticks from the second mission onward. Nothing score-like ever arrives to mark the set pieces, and the war-over epilogue plays out in appropriate but hardly flattering silence. Whatever the intent, the result is a campaign that feels unfinished rather than atmospheric.
Controls are the other period tax. Select doubles as the jump button, a scheme that demands a claw grip on original hardware and feels awkward even remapped onto a PS4 controller, and the aiming stays stiff and sluggish even with the right stick mapped to face buttons. Aim assist becomes essential rather than optional; without it the PSP targeting is barely playable. The right-stick remap improves comfort without changing the underlying stiffness, and the compromise defines every firefight. A PS TV setup softens the ergonomics but cannot fix the fundamentals.
Mission design alternates between two rhythms. Run-and-gun raids carry primary plus hidden secondary objectives feeding a percent-completion score, silver ranks for full objective clearance and gold gated behind an accuracy threshold around 70% that is functionally unattainable on PSP hardware. Capture-and-hold defences with point targets and timers provide the counterweight, and they work mechanically even when the 15-minute hold targets drag. The missions are bite-sized and dense, each a checklist rather than a journey, and the pacing benefits from it; brisk and quick are features here, not bugs.
The hidden secondary objectives reward curiosity, most of the time. A secret behind a fireplace in the finale nearly derails the ending when the trigger is missed, and the percent-completion system makes those misses expensive. Kamikaze enemies charge while firing non-stop, one of the few enemy behaviours that reads as genuinely hostile rather than cannon-fodder, and unreliable reloading on some weapons adds friction the controls already supply. Multiplayer-unlock skins and medals accrue along the way, and the campaign completion medal on veteran difficulty is a genuinely earned capper.
Nostalgia is a real part of the equation. The PSP-era online multiplayer, fondly remembered from a childhood vantage, casts a warm light over the whole package, and the control scheme’s flaws become part of the period charm rather than a dealbreaker. Around two hours on veteran covers the entire 15-mission campaign with secondaries collected and medals earned. It is a good little game, the kind the handheld library built its reputation on, and the brevity that would sink a modern release reads as confidence here.
Overall, this is a brisk, nostalgic handheld anthology whose dense objectives, two-hour campaign and multiplayer-forged heritage outweigh the absent soundtrack, the select-button jump and the accuracy-gated gold ranks. The bite-sized missions and hidden secondaries give it a checklist satisfaction the genre rarely bothers with at this scale. Judge it as a period piece and it holds up as exactly the compact war shooter it set out to be.
