Single player is great. Multiplayer is only 2-man co-op. Competitive version from the first game would've been fitting.
D-Day is a mix of the first and second games, with levels from both being cut out.
There are several obvious disappointing things about the game, though it's mostly just the amount of the AI appearing in levels proportionate to the other versions.
The player can only command one team at a time (in the other versions, the player could command two seperate teams) with a limit of two guys maximum in that one team, so basically the player gets to boss two guys around and that's it. There aren't quite as many enemies, either, even though there are a few battles in the game that show it could've clearly handled more AI at once, such as when the player meets up with the guys with the bazooka in the second level and the part where the player meets up with Mac and Leggett to fight a tank in another level.
On the levels where the player gets the tank, he doesn't get any infantry buddies, so it's just the player and the tank. This is fine, though a lot of the fun is lost when the player loses his infantry buddies and must put all of his reliance into the tank.
For all the tank's power, there aren't enough enemies to stand against it. Most enemies can be wiped out by the tank alone, with minimal assistance from the player. The player (and/or his tank) might kill two enemies, and suddenly they'll reach a checkpoint. Then they'll kill two more enemies and reach another checkpoint. It's an inane way to set up checkpoints. There just aren't enough enemies, especially on the tank levels, is what I'm getting at. The tank levels were the only levels I liked on the PS2 version, but it's almost the opposite on the PSP. Just not enough enemies proportionate to the tank's power, I guess. There's only one enemy tank and one enemy with an anti-tank weapon on the first two tank levels.
In the beginning of the second level, the tank guy says "Your guys can use me as cover while they keep the Kraut infantry off me!" even though "your guys" don't exist. When the tank guy dies, the top half of his dead body is floating above the tank leaning forward. Once the player beats the level, a movie plays out the part where the tank guy dies with something entirely different happening and the guy dying backwards, and suddenly the tank is in a completely different place at the start of the next level.
Enough about the tank. Brothers in Arms always had a lot of weird plot holes.
The game skips the beginning, where the player and his buddies all die horribly, and goes straight to the airplane on D-Day where the player and his squad are going to paratroop down. Rather than scenes like the interior of the plane and the paratroop drop being rendered in-game, they're just movies recorded from the other games. This is actually pretty good, because then you can see the scenes with top-quality graphics, though it's kind of weird how characters will have no face painting in-game but will be covered with it in the cutscenes.
Sometimes, the game requires the player to stand in a certain position near his buddies to advance the game with a bit of dialogue, though it takes a while to find that certain position. Kind of weird. First time I had to find my place, I thought the game broke.
Some scripted sequences are taken out, mostly because characters that would normally be present were removed (since the player gets less teammates). On the level after the two tank levels, for example, there's supposed to be a scene where a plane goes down, but that scene is non-existant on the PSP.
"Shell shock" is weird and kind of pointless. The player will be hit by an explosion, and instantly look upwards. The camera will jerk around wildly, skipping any sort of animation, and then the player is back on his feet magically as if the shell shock sequence never happened.
The sound is good for the most-part, but the levels contain no music and some guns sound of a rather annoyingly low quality, along with some menu sounds. The German dialogue's quality is pretty bad, too. Some areas are just dead silent, save for immediately relevant sound effects. At least they kept a lot of the battle chatter.
For some reason, the player uses the voice of the guy from the second game, even if he's playing levels from the first game (so even if he's supposed to be Baker, he'll sound like someone else). The player also doesn't say the names of the characters he's ordering around, unlike in the other versions.
The graphics are nice. The character models pretty good. Levels look all right, though there's not much opportunity for impressive detail, and there are a lot of weird, pointy hedges and other strange-looking outdoor things. Building interiors are pretty empty, too. All that is the same way on the PC/console versions. Fire looks hilariously cheap, but it's fitting enough.
The worst, most unforgiveable thing about the game is the frame rate. Obviously, the only reason AI and such were taken out is because of the game's terrible frame rate. However, the game still goes incredibly slow. They made absolutely no attempt to make the environment render faster on the PSP, either by lowering the quality of the environment, or the quality of any other graphics effects. It's a mystery if removing AI actually sped up the game at all.
The tactical screen view becomes blurred and terrain textures are colored solid, with the ground being replaced by a white grid. This actually makes everything easier to see than on the other versions where the textures stay the same.
There are only two control schemes, and when I first looked at them, I thought it'd take forever to figure them out. Neither of them have anything in common with other PSP FPSs. They actually end up being pretty easy to use, though it would've been nice if I could've changed the sensitivity. The second control scheme lets the player move and strafe with the analog nub while looking left and right with square and circle, but for some reason, the player can only move in four directions in that control scheme, and all of the buttons are trivialized, anyway.
The player can't look up/down and move at the same time, so it's hard to fight enemies at close-quarters because the recoil makes the player shoot the enemy's head, but then shoot above their heads so he can't keep shooting at them and the enemy gets an opening to strike. Luckily, the player can automatically perform a melee attack by pressing the shoot button when he's close enough to an enemy. I only did one or two melee attacks the entire game, though. I never did a single melee attack on the PC version.
When the player gets tired of the campaign, he can jump into twelve different "skirmish" missions- Six as Americans, or six as Germans. Being able to play as Germans outside of a standard player-versus-player match is something I've never seen in a World War 2 first-person-shooter, so that's pretty cool, though it's kind of funky when it comes down to names and injury notification, so they obviously didn't put any thought or work into it. The player sounds exactly the same whether he's American or German, and the AI on both teams don't bother talking.
The player gets only two teammates each mission. Skirmish missions can play out either with a standard objective, a time limit to kill every enemy, or a challenge where the player must defend an area with his allies against a limitless onslaught of enemies (though only a few at a time). There's also a "Tour of Duty" mode where the player must play all six missions with the same teammates and one life throughout.
Why is it that the player can't hit anyone on a machine gun? I'm used to playing Call of Duty where you can actually hit enemies you can see when aiming down the sight, but an enemy can have part of their body out in the open, plain as day in a Brothers in Arms game and be completely unhittable. The sight is so rigged.
Allies can only take, like... Two hits, which is especially worsened by the fact that you only get two allies at the most. I'm not sure why they even have the health bar for teammates since a single bullet can instantly take a buddy down.
The multiplayer is a tad disappointing, but still pretty nice. It's limited to two players via Ad Hoc in a of co-op version of the "skirmish" missions. I'm not sure if both players get AI buddies to order around or not, as I haven't been able to play the co-op. It's nice to get some co-op, as the first game contained no co-op mode, and the competitive mode from the first game wouldn't have run, anyway.
The first game had multiplayer where four players, each with three AI buddies (only two AI buddies on the crappy PS2 version) would battle it out (at least one player had to be on both teams). Though it wasn't all that great on the consoles or PC, it would've worked perfectly on the PSP because four players is a good Ad Hoc limit, and each player having their own AI troopers would've really improved on it. Too bad the frame rate is so crappy that the game can barely run as it is.
I would've rather had the four-player versus mode than the co-op, but the co-op is still really nice so two players can actually help eachother out rather than trying to put the beat-down on eachother.
An online mode would've been nice, too, though it would've been better for the four-man fighting than the co-op mode.
Though the single player doesn't have quite enough AI at once, it's still fun. Skirmish mode is pretty interesting, though quite similar to the campaign, just without the dialogue or plot. Trying to buckle down and take on every enemy thrown at you is a pretty good time killer, especially if you have a buddy with you.
Sadly, the game has a terrible frame rate, despite the fact that they removed more than half of the AI in every level. Sometimes, it runs a decent speed, but most of the time, it slowly and painfully crawls along as if it's just barely running. It's surprising the game is so virtually crash-free.
The game provides nothing more than a "Brothers in Arms fix". If you're really digging the PC or console versions, but you're away from them, wishing you could play them, the PSP version will just barely satisfy you because it maintains the same gameplay, even if it is crapped down and frustratingly slow. Truly, I might not have minded the utter lack of AI if removing the AI had actually improved on the frame rate at all.
Sadly, as it stands, though the game can be fun, it's just another example of port-gone-wrong, giving ports a bad name. The formula to a good port is first taking a game that's already enjoyable today (rather than taking an old game that nobody really likes anymore, like Medieval), then porting the game without taking tons of fun, significant stuff out. The only games that ever really came close to this are the Grand Theft Auto Stories games, which aren't actually ports at all.