Star Wars Lethal Alliance PSP

I just finished off playing through Star Wars Lethal Alliance, a PSP & DS exclusive game (obviously I played the PSP version)... I had this game for quite awhile. I originally played halfway through, got stuck at the Rancor boss battle, and put the game away forgetting about it until the last few days when I've been playing it on & off.

You play as a new character in the Star Wars universe, Rianna Saren. SHE'S NOT A JEDI. *Ahem* if you can get over that, she has blasters, and a floating-orb droid buddy named Zeeo. He's actually pretty cool-- together they can pull off acrobatic moves; she flips over him & such-- not to mention he slices (hacks) into computer systems while Rianna defends him.

The game is basically a platform/shooter, with some puzzle work, punctuated by a few turret defense missions.

I wouldn't say this game is terrible, but it's not really remarkable either. It uses the Unreal engine, and while there's nothing outright broken about it, overall it's a bit clunky. The targeting is the worst part, you use the shoulder buttons to select/switch between targets, whether those are enemies to shoot, or data ports for Zeeo to slice. The problem with this is that it never seems to target the enemies you NEED it to target, i.e. the closest enemies to you. One of Rianna's weapons is "the Thorn of Ryloth" which is a glowing dagger thing that is NOT A LIGHTSABER. It activates whenever an enemy is in close range, and is good because sometimes it can do 1 shot kills, and it doesn't have limited ammo like the guns do. But because the targeting system never seems to target the closest enemy to you (even though it says it does in the instructions) often you'll have an enemy right beside you, the Thorn of Ryloth is on, but the target is on some faraway enemy that might even be behind some crates or something. So you have to do some fancy retargeting which really becomes a pain.

There are action combos that sometimes don't seem to work even though I know I'm pressing the buttons. So overall there's a sluggishness to the game, while it doesn't make it unplayable, it could have been better.

Star Wars Lethal Alliance is not a terrible game, nor is it a super memorable game. It reminds me of mediocre linear adventure games on PS2 or Xbox. There's no real open world feel to it; you have to perform the platforming exactly as they want you to. I'm a huge Star Wars fan, and I have to admit, Rianna is super sexy, and I love the chemistry between her & Zeeo. The game has many really short levels, which is good and bad-- you go through 1 room and it considers that a level, so it asks you to save. It's good for a portable game because you may not have a lot of time on the go, so you can do a quick level & put it away for when you have another spare 5-10 mins. But it can be annoying always being asked to save that frequently. Overall the game is fairly short, 4, maybe 5 hours....

Just feels like the game was polished just enough to be considered functional, but not nearly enough to make it something special.

Star Wars Lethal Alliance trailer:





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