The game, set between the PlayStation 3's Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2, makes another attempt to turn the fast-paced, controller-heavy shooter genre into something enjoyable on a portable platform. With just one analog stick available on the PSP, Resistance: Retribution compensates by taking most of the aiming away from gamers, instead focusing on the action.

Can a third-person shooter with auto-aiming be any fun? Let's see.

Loved
Solid Action-Shooter Blend: Resistance: Retribution is not a shooter. And that's a good thing. Sure it has elements of a shooter built into it. You point and you shoot. But instead of a game built around a player's ability to accurately deliver bursts of pinpoint fire into a target, Retribution's auto-assist system takes over most of the aiming, allowing you to instead concentrate on tactics, cover and weapon selection, making for a playable and enjoyable game.

Rich Multiplayer Support: Multiplayer in Retribution is surprisingly robust, offering up five game play modes and, most importantly, the ability to turn aim assist off for hardcore shooter matches. I found the online play to be mostly lag free and much more enjoyable than I expected.

PlayStation 3 Add-Ons: If you own Resistance 2, you can plug your PSP into your PS3 to unlock to interesting modes for Retribution. The PSP Plus mode allows you to play the game with a PS3 controller, though it forces you to stay tethered to the console. While the Infection mode gives you a chance to play through the game with an infected lead character and new weapon.

Intense Pacing: Retribution is a far-reaching, almost over-reaching title for the PlayStation Portable, delivering an experience that never seems to let up until the game is over. I actually found myself pausing the game at times to prepare for an expected onslaught.

Diverse Settings: Retribution has you climbing all over the game's many settings. You go under, through and around Luxembourg, Paris, Rotterdam, Warsaw and Bonn and will even do your fair share of swimming and a bit of alien architecture spelunking.

Eclectic Enemies: There's quite a wide variety of enemies in the game, from creatures that have to be headshot before they explode, to the Resistance-mainstay Chimeran. But what I like best about Retribution is the game's willingness to throw its ever expanding menagerie at you almost every level. The combination of different attack methods and tactics gives the game some much needed challenge.

Hated
Complex Controls: It's a shooter-derivative on a portable, so there are bound to be issues. While most of the control mainstays work fine in the game, doing things like zooming in to manually target or swapping weapons quickly can lead to some death by confusion.

Slow Grayson: One of my biggest frustrations with the game is how slowly character lead James Grayson sidesteps and "runs". It's expected that the lead in a game like this should be agile, so dying because he can't seem to get his feet under him can be annoying.

Horrid Writing: The dialog for the game is atrocious. It's not just seemingly out of character, out of sync with the situation, but many of the things that come out of the cast of Retribution's mouth are out of character for the entire decade in which the game is set. Worse still the plot is so muddled, so anchored down with relationships no one cares about and Machiavellian-motives never fully explained that it's worth playing the game with the sound muted.

Taking away the need to aim in a third-person shooter is quite a risk, but Sony Bend recognized, I think, the fact that shooters on portables just don't seem to work right. Instead of trying to come up with a marginal system for aiming and moving, they threw the whole thing out and delivered a hybrid that's more action game than shooter. And it works for me. Sure there are times when the game was a bit too easy, but that's something easily fixed with tweaked AI and enemy count. What matters most is that, with some exception, I found myself struggling more with the enemy than the controls. And that's a rare thing in portable shooters.

Despite its shortcomings, Resistance: Retribution is worth picking up. The game delivers a hefty 10 or so hours of play, not counting the ability to play through a second time "infected", and a surprisingly robust, enjoyable multiplayer experience.

Resistance: Retribution was developed by Sony Bend and published by SCEA. Released on Playstation Portable on March 17, retails for $39.99. Completed campaign, played multiple online battles, tested out PSP Plus and Infected modes.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The Road to Retribution Tournament will have players going head-to-head in the third-person shooter in 2v2 and 4v4 ladders.

The tournament kicks off today and runs through May 10. Prizes include SonyStyle gear, PSP system prize packs and a Resistance: Retribution leather bomber jacket.

Prizes include:

2v2 Competition Prizes
• First Place (2 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards, and PSP® TV Prize Pack (32" XBR TV, PSP®-3000, 16GB PRO Duo and Component AV Cables. ARV $1420) for each player
• Second Place (2 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards, and PSP® Pack (PSP®-3000, 16GB PRO Duo. ARV $370) for each player
• Third Place (2 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards for each player
• Fourth Place (2 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards for each player

4v4 Competition Prizes
• First Place (4 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards, and PSP® TV Prize Pack (32" XBR TV, PSP-3000, 16GB PRO Duo and Component AV Cables. ARV $1420) for each player
• Second Place (4 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards, and PSP® Pack (PSP-3000, 16GB PRO Duo. ARV $370) for each player
• Third Place (4 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards for each player
• Fourth Place (4 players): Leather Bomber Jacket (ARV $180), $500 in Sonystyle® Gift Cards for each player

Road to Retribution

Developed by Sony Bend, the developers behind the Syphon Filter series, Retribution follows the story of former British Royal Marine James Grayson in the wake of the bombing of the Chimeran tower in London at the end of the original game. Players control Grayson from a third-person perspective as he seeks revenge for the gruesome death of his brother, uncovering a much larger Chimeran plot in the process.

Does Resistance: Retribution kick off the rebirth of the PSP, or do owners of Sony's handheld still have a while to wait? The fate of humanity lies in the hands of game critics.

IGN UK
Resistance: Retribution is the start of Sony's surge; the first of a planned wave of blockbuster brands that the company hopes will make 2009 an "exciting year for PSP". It's not an especially auspicious start – more of a whimper than a bang. It's not that Retribution is a bad game, because it's not. But it's by far the weakest game in the Resistance series so far, and it singularly fails to do for the PSP what its bigger, high-def brothers did for the PlayStation 3; it's difficult to imagine anybody buying a new PSP off the back of anything other than the success of Resistance: Retribution's flashier forebears.

GameZone
The grizzled and battle-hardened Grayson lacks the stoic silence of Sgt. Hale (the hero from the two PS3 iterations), instead cracking out bad one-liners in a overwhelming cockney accent that sounds like Jason Statham woke up on the wrong side of the bed. While it does provide some cool backstory elements that explain the nature of the Cloven, the story and dialogue aren't really the game's strong suits.

IGN
...there are challenging parts to Retribution...but I never really felt like the enemies were offering up that much of a fight in Retribution. Hell, there were times when a Boiler (a Chimeran female whose head explodes if she gets too close to you) would pop up and scare the hell out of me and the final mission has two tunnels that are literally filled with every enemy you've faced and very few health packs, but I always felt like I could get through it with ease. Obviously, you could crank the difficulty up to try and get a better challenge out of the title, but even then it didn't seem like insurmountable odds.

GameTrailers
Resistance: Retribution is one of the best-looking games on the PSP with large, detailed environments, great lighting effects, and smartly-designed textures that do a great job of masking low-poly character models. The impressive audio design features voice acting that's on par with the console iterations of the franchise. The orchestral soundtrack is fantastic during gripping action sequences, and haunting Russian folk tunes clue you in to nearby secrets. This is definitely a game you'll want to play with headphones plugged in.

PGNx Media
Overall, it looks like Sony Bend did it again with Resistance: Retribution...The visuals are sharper, the levels are larger and the controls are streamlined. Add to this a 10-hour singleplayer campaign (and another, remixed 10-hour campaign) plus one of the deepest multiplayer feature sets on the PSP and you have one of the system's killer apps. Sony Bend was able to bring Resistance to the PSP in a way that takes advantage of the system's strengths and feels like it's own game in the Resistance universe instead of a dumbed down version of the console versions. Man, UK reviewers are hard to please, aren't they?

The game includes five multiplayer modes:

Team Deathmatch: Eliminate the players on the opposing team. The team with the highest score wins.

Capture The Flag: Grab the opposing team's flag and deliver it to your base to score the capture. You flag is required at your base to score.

Containment: Capture coolant nodes to overheat and destroy the opposing teams reactor. Controlling both coolant nodes increases the overheat time

Assimilation: The Cloven must eliminate the Maquis forces and assimilate them to their team. The last Maquis to be eliminated ends the round. The player with the highest individual score wins.

Free For All: All players are out for themselves. Eliminate the opposition and the player with the highest score wins.

Tons more information can be found in this video, as well as a look at multiplayer gameplay.

Customers who pre-order Resistance: Retribution for the PSP from GameStop, Amazon, Best Buy, or Game Crazy will receive a voucher code that allows them to download a demo of the game from the PlayStation Store to their PSP. The demo consists of some single-player gameplay along with the opportunity to try out the Resistance Connect multiplayer modes.

While some might worry over the fact that you have to pre-order the game to access the demo, just keep this in mind: A pre-order can be canceled, but a downloaded demo is forever, sort of.

Try Resistance: Retribution Two Months Before It Comes Out! [PlayStation.Blog]

This video walks you through some of the features which are broken down into two different modes:

Infected mode will allow you to connect the PSP shooter to the PS3 shooter and infect the main character with the Chimeran virus. Once infected the lead will have a new look, new abilities, new weapons and the game itself will get new dialog because people will react to your infection.

Plus mode will let you use a Playstation 3 controller to play the entire game on your PSP. That means dual analog sticks, and because of that the game will be made a bit harder and, of course, aim assist will be turned off.

I love how ownership of both games gives you two new ways to play the game, though it would have been nice to support the PS3 controller option for everyone, not just people who own both games.

There were no big announcements or proclamations at the event, but it did showcase Killzone 2 and Resistance: Retribution, kind of apt considering Resistance: Fall of Man was a console launch title. They also had a video depicting the evolution of the console's firmware, which is always sort of trippy to remember what you didn't have two years ago and what you take for granted now. And on that score, of course, PlayStation Home's open beta will hit sometime before the end of the year.

Worldwide sales of the console stand at 16.8 million units at the year two mark. So, cheers and here's to year three.

It may look like a shooter at first glance, but really Retribution plays more like a third-person action title, which is a good idea. The problem with creating a straight-up shooter for the Playstation Portable is that the controls just aren't right for that genre so whatever a developer does is going to feel like a making the best of a bad situation.

In this case the aiming reticule floats in a pretty sizable rectangle and essentially auto aims anything that's in there. This means that while you have to point your screen in the general direction of enemies, you don't have to try to finesse out small movements with the thumbstick and four face buttons. And that's a really good call.

Despite how it sounds, that doesn't make the game too easy. You still have to worry about weapon selection, about cover, you do even have to do a bit of fine-tune aiming with certain weapons. The end result is an experience that feels like a shooter lite, but in a good way.

I'm never going to want to have this title replace my console and big television experience, but why would I want to. It's nice to see that the developers understand that they shouldn't be trying to compete with the home console Resistance experience and instead try to augment it with something a bit different.

What does that actually mean? All new gameplay features, unlockable items and new areas that can only be reached with an infected copy.

James Grayson, protagonist of Resistance: Retribution, will be infected by the Chimera virus similar to the original game's Nathan Hale. He'll be able to regenerate health — all health packs will be removed — and experience the game in an all new way.

In addition to health regeneration, Grayson also gets a new weapon, the HE .44 Magnum featured in Resistance 2.

Grayson also gets the ability to breathe underwater, letting him access areas of Resistance: Retribution that a normal version of our hero could never reach. That will likely play into finding the new unlockable intel only available if your copy of the PSP game is "infected."

It's a cool little feature that looks to add some replayability to Bend Studio's PSP game, something that hardcore Resistance fans will likely get a kick out of. We'll go play it on those lovely new PSP 3000s right.... NOW.

By plugging in your AV-output capable PSP (2000 and 3000 models) and connecting the PSP to the PS3 via USB, you'll be able to switch on PSP Plus control through Resistance 2. Doing so adds DualShock 3 control support, letting you play PSP games on your television with a PS3 controller. It disables aim assist in Resistance: Retribution and lets the player alter their control layout to take advantage of the PS3 controller's extra inputs.

The option requires that gamers have a copy of Resistance 2 in their PS3s, but will not require a firmware update for either the PSP or PS3.

Nathan Hale doesn't feature in Retribution at all — instead, we've got a new character named James Grayson, a Private in the British forces.

Backstory on the game is that Grayson's brother, an RAF pilot, gets shot down, and Grayson goes in to look for him — and finds him on a table, the Chimera's newest conversion project. This means, of course, that Grayson's got to kill his own bro, and this makes him into a vengeful Chimera-slaughtering machine. He goes AWOL on a rampage, gets bagged for treason, and that's where the game starts.

Raine Bouchard of the Maquis helps Grayson get out of prison, and he joins the Maquis in a time when the Chimera are running low on bodies and are experimenting with new conversion methods. According to assistant producer Roberts, "inner strife and turmoil" drives the story.

Developer Bend Studio has built it on its third-gen PSP engine — by the way, these are the guys responsible for the Syphon Filter titles Dark Mirror and Logan's Shadow. Roberts admitted, though, that the Syphon Filter difficulty ramp wasn't suitable for everyone, and that Resistance: Retribution is being designed to be more accessible.

Roberts said the "aim assist" feature is not an auto-aim — there's no way to permanently lock on and stay that way, but the target window will find enemies in view and target them generally, with the player free to switch between enemies. In other words, you only have to aim a little bit Cover is automatic when approached, and tapping the trigger button will make the player pop out and fire automatically. Whereas Hale regenerated, Grayson is a normal man who needs health packs to recover. They've made them red to match the health packs so that they stand out.

It does seem like the control design is easier to deal with, probably an item of value when dealing with a shooter on the PSP. One standout item about this title? The graphics are incredible, vivid and alive with specular light. Seriously, stunning.

LocoRoco 2, Patapon 2, NBA 09: Inside, Super Stardust Portable, Buzz! Master Quiz, Valkyria Chronicles and Midnight Club: Los Angeles Remix.

"We've always felt that the PSP was one of the keys to Sony owning the living room," Tretton said.