Big, fun brawls, phalanx mode is neat. Some feeling of cheapness here and there. Lack of extra replay value.
Before I start, here's precisely why the creators decided to make the game for the PSP: They were in a hurry to beat the release of the movie, which is simply titled "300" (no March to Glory in it). The PSP has two things about it that make it perfect for making a game being made in a hurry.
For one, it's incredibly weak compared to the current generation of in-home consoles. If they had made a game for the XBOX 360 and its counter-parts, they'd have to work extra-hard to accommodate to the demands of the high-end graphics, and they'd never be finished in time.
However, the PSP also has so much power that they can make a really good game, albeit rather cheaply. The DS, though a very good console in itself, wouldn't have had the power to support 300: March to Glory the way it is without looking weird and awful.
Enough about that. Now for the game.
I'm not sure where to start. I guess I should point out the game's immediate features in the menu. There's not much in the department of options. You can't customize the controls, though they're fine the way they are.
You also can't turn subtitles off, though I wouldn't complain because I turn subtitles on in every game.
There's no multiplayer, but not every game actually NEEDS multiplayer. Then again, a co-op mode would've been nice because the player is occasionally accompanied by at least one teammate, and kicking butt with another player is always cool.
One "problem" (depends on how you look at it) is that there's no difficulty setting. Now, in every game I've ever played that has no difficulty setting, it generally means some parts will be way too easy and other parts will be way too hard. It's not terrible, but I often play through a game on each difficulty setting (from easiest to hardest), so a lack of a changeable difficulty takes away the want for me to challenge myself after already beating the game.
That covers the menu. Let me talk about the technical whatnots in-game...
PLEASE LET ME!
Okay. The graphics are pretty good, mainly because they manage to look good while allowing for lots of soldiers running around on-screen at the same time without slowing down. King Leonidas (the guy you play as) looks super-kickass. I love those big Spartan helmets. And the red cape? Friggin' awesome.
Blood squirts quite nicely as bodies get ripped apart, and the arrow effect is great. Tons of arrows rain down, and remain sticking out of solid objects (like people) a second after contact, though they fade away because it'd look weird to have King Leonidas running around with a million arrows sticking out of his shield.
There are some glaring moments of cheapness. Some special effects are rather, dare I say, half-assed. When the player uses his special ability to heal himself, his character kneels, everything freezes, the screen gets all yellowish and glowy, then he's magically healed and it's back to fighting. With all of the motion in the game, the healing effect looks crappy and out-of-place. Still, it gets the job done.
You can obviously see the back of King Leonidas through his cape more often than not. Kind of ridiculous.
Everyone has a perfectly round shadow. Obviously, they can't have actual shadows because those are pretty system-intensive, but round shadows look like crap. It would've been nicer if there were no shadows at all.
Overall, simply because the game can handle quite a number of soldiers fighting at once, I'd say the graphics are good. Now, if it was a one-on-one fighting game, it'd look AWFUL.
One cool thing about this game is that corpses are permanent, up to a limited amount.
The sound is good. Every sound effect is just right, and some are down-right satisfying to hear, like the crack of an enemy's shield as it splits in twine and flies away.
There are way too many sounds MISSING, though. When there should obviously be some sort of generic sound effect at one point, it's naught but silence. It makes everything look funny, as if the game was muted. If not for the music, it might as well be in such situations.
The dialogue is well-spoken and always conveys the plot and the feelings of the characters and whatnot, though nothing gets very deep or in-depth very often. I was relieved that they even bothered to include spoken dialogue. Lots of games try to get away with no spoken dialogue at all.
There's no generic dialogue (like "battle chatter"), though. That's kind of disappointing, just because generic dialogue enhances a battle, though it's not like you'll be in the middle of a battle going "I WISH MY ENEMIES WOULD TALK WHILE I CHOP OFF THEIR HEADS!" Not many beat-'em-up games have generic dialogue, anyway.
Music is great, too. Most especially on the very first level, including the music that plays throughout the level, and then the boss music.
Controls are pretty much as good as they're getting. For some reason, I was actually bothered by the fact that the player can't jump, even though there's never actually a need to do so, especially in beat-'em-ups.
King Leonidas can bust out some mean combos. However, there simply aren't enough. You can use your shield to end a special combo, but you can't use your shield to begin a combo. I often made the mistake of trying to press some buttons to pull off a combo, but instead, I'd be left with... Well, no combo. Then I'd get hit in the face because I would expect my character to follow up his last attack with another, but instead he'd just stop.
I was bothered by the lack of combos. Y'see, I'd been playing The Warriors on the PSP just a week or two prior to getting my hands on 300, and in The Warriors, just about every button combination is a cool combo. There are probably combos I've never even used in The Warriors. In 300, there's just not that many.
One neat thing is that they at least make you time your button presses to pull off combinations beyond two swings. Then again, that also makes me feel like the game is moving slowly.
King Leonidas gets a sword, spear and shield to beat down his enemies. The sword is meant to tear honkeys up, the spear is meant to break enemy shields, and the player's own shield is mainly meant to knock back or stun enemies. It can also be thrown at high speeds to cut someone's head off. It's pretty easy to switch between the sword and the spear, as King Leonidas can magically make one disappear and the other appear in its place by pressing triangle.
The shield uses its own button (circle) for attacking, while L blocks. X and square do two different types of attacks. Holding L and R at the same time blocks arrows that rain down from the sky. Holding R while attacking (which uses up "wrath") makes attacks much meaner. The d-pad does different abilities at the expense of a full bar of wrath.
Holding L, then pressing X and square at the same time throws the player's spear. There are usually spears lying around that can be picked up, and enemies will sometimes drop them, though the player should always be careful not to readily throw his spear if it looks like there aren't any around to pick up afterward. The spear is necessary to break shields, though the player can still kill shielded enemies with his sword when they drop their guard.
There are a lot of parts in the beginning where they make you tap X repeatedly to do things. However, that pretty much only happens on one level, and on all of the following levels, you just have to press X once to do tasks that could count as tasks where you could have to tap X repeatedly.
They try to pull off two "stealth" levels, but you can just rush through the levels, killing everything in your path, without having to be stealthy at all. Stealthiness is also difficult because you often can't even see the people you're supposed to be avoiding.
The whole game begins with a movie that's basically a bunch of nice-looking moving pictures accompanied by a narrative. I usually find that to be a cheap way to make cutscenes, especially when there's a conversation going on with lots of character dialogue. However, the "moving picture" method is great when a narrator is telling a story.
The story is good, too, though it's not actually made for the game. The game and movie are based on some graphic novel that I've never heard of. This game definitely makes me want to watch the movie, though.
Once the cutscene is over, the camera flies by some Spartans battling it out with some half-naked Persians. Now, this is where you'll notice that the animations for some characters look kind of funny, especially for the half-naked Persians. Though they're competent in battle, their poses would suggest that they'd rather take a nap than fight. Then again, they are slaves,.
The level then begins with some dialogue, which sounds very well acted-out, as I mentioned above. Then it quickly throws a crapload of enemies at King Leonidas, which he must fight by himself, even though he has a whole phalanx of troops just a few meters away.
This is where the game had me worried. You see, I LOVE teammates. Teammates enhance the fun of battles a million times over. However, in the very first fight, I was alone. However, after I slew the half-naked Persians with great ease, I was then accompanied by two allies in the next fight. 300, I'm happy to say, gives the player at least one teammate in almost every situation, save for boss fights, which are usually one versus one.
One thing that's kind of weird is that a bunch of Spartans will be with the player in a cutscene or while he's walking, then they'll suddenly disappear, sometimes right before the player's very eyes. Like, before the player first meets archer enemies, he has two buddies. Upon meeting the archers, one of his buddies disappears. Not that that's a terrible thing, because he still gets one buddy, which is really all that's needed to make things awesome. It's just inconsistent. Though the lack of consistency sure is consistent, as you'll constantly have allies appear out of nowhere in cutscenes, then disappear, leaving you with one.
The sound, right from the very beginning of the game, instantly immersed me into a big, crazy battle. Now, there's not ACTUALLY a big, crazy battle going on. It's just that the music and ambience made me feel like, if I could just turn the camera, I'd see a whole crapload of people fighting.
Have you heard about the phalanx, yet? The phalanx is a rather interesting system, and it's mainly all about timing. King Leonidas says, at pre-defined points, "Let's all make a phalanx, gang! Jinkies!" The phalanx has a health bar, which slowly decreases over time, or as the phalanx takes damage. The player must get to his destination with the phalanx before the bar runs out. X smites enemies, square breaks enemy shields, and when enemies try to push on the phalanx, circle pushes back.
Tons of enemies just rush at the phalanx, begging to have the crap beaten out of them. Even when you're just stabbing downward, blood spews everywhere and heads fly all around. Sweet.
I got really confused when I got to the elephant at the end of the first phalanx sequence. It just said, "Push L to block!" but nobody said that killing the elephant would be weirdly easy yet confusing. The elephant's attacks can simply be blocked with the shields, even if it's trying to stomp on the Spartans. Then the phalanx just needs to stab it. It was pretty easy, but I died the first time because I didn't know that all of the Spartans would have to be in a phalanx to block and stab the elephant.
One annoying thing about the phalanx is that, enemies that take certain conditions to kill (like enemies that must be knocked down, then stabbed while they're on the ground) can easily be killed like anyone else when you're in the phalanx. Actually, the only reason that's annoying is because, when you're out of the phalanx, those same types of enemies are suddenly magically more difficult to kill.
At one point in the game, AND ONLY ONE POINT, there's a "dome phalanx". It's incredibly easy to use. You point the analog stick in a direction, and it kills incoming enemies in that direction. Hold any of the face buttons to heal the corresponding part of the dome phalanx. I never had to heal with the dome phalanx because it never even got damaged. The dome phalanx sequence was so freaking easy and ended so quickly (ten seconds or so), I wondered why they even put it in the game, especially with a self-healing function.
One of the cool things about the game is the rain of arrows. Everything turns dark, and suddenly a crapload of arrows rain down, killing everything. Your allies immediately block the arrows, and you have more than enough time to react in order to block the arrows yourself. Enemies with shields will also block the arrows on occasion, but enemies without shields die horribly, so it's almost as if the arrows were good buddies of yours.
Still, the rain of arrows can get really annoying whenever you're in a phalanx, or when you're holding double swords, or even if it suddenly begins whenever you're in the middle of a special move to kill an enemy.
The game features a "store" of sorts, where you earn "money" by beating up enemies. Then you press the select button, and you can spend the money on better equipment, stronger special abilities or more combos. Every equipment upgrade makes the upgraded object appear different. Even when getting armor upgrades, King Leonidas remains half-naked. Pretty much the only real add-on is a metal square that covers the center of his chest. I thought his very first suit of armor (the unupgraded one) was the coolest-looking of them all, but I only saw it for about ten minutes, as I soon bought the upgraded version. Same goes for the shield, sword and spear. They start off as realistic, then they get absurd and funny-looking so, aside from the red cape, Leonidas no longer matches his allies.
One of the truly annoying things about the game is that, though there are places where you get to cut through tons of weak enemies, there are also a lot of places where you have to fight guys with shields. Shields are annoying, since only the spear can break them. Some enemies have unreasonable ways in which they must be killed. The Persian infantry, which carry big shields, can only be killed by knocking them down with a wrath attack, then stabbing them while they're on the ground. Commanders can only be killed by an instant-kill wrath attack. They often throw in way too many hard-to-kill enemies, and not nearly enough weak ones to make up for it. I like to just hack through countless enemies, and it gets annoying when some guy with a shield ruins my fun by making me switch strategies.
Y'know, aside from the sword, shield and spear, the player at one point gets double-swords. OUT OF NOWHERE, he gets them. Now, I didn't mention it before, but this game reminded me of Spartan: Total Warrior before I even got it. Mainly because it's a beat-'em-up in which you play as a Spartan.
Spartan: Total Warrior's weapons consisted of a sword/shield, a spear, and double swords. I think the player got something else, too, but I can't remember. The player couldn't hold a shield while using the spear in Spartan: Total Warrior.
Anyway, once I found the double swords, this suddenly made me feel like I had to be playing some trippy level in Spartan: Total Warrior. The double-swords in 300 are extremely fast, just like the ones in Total Warrior.
They were too lazy to give the double-swords an instant-kill animation, so instead, you just do some weak-looking stabs that don't work against "must-use-instant-wrath-kill" enemies.
At one point in the game, and I'm not sure why, the player has to slaughter a bunch of weirdos with goat heads, funny-looking midgets, and near-naked Harem girls. All are harmless, but you practically HAVE to kill them. It's a shooting gallery with spears, and they're all really easy to hit as they run around. Now, I knew that the goat-headed guys and the crazy midgets had to die, but why the near-naked Harem girls? How can King Leonidas be a goodguy when he goes around impaling harmless women on spears?
This game doesn't do a very good job of making the game feel like you're a part of three hundred guys fighting millions.
One system they love to employ in this game is the "move-too-far-away-from-someone-and-a-brand-new-exact-copy-spawns". This mainly only happens in "arena" sections, where you must kill every enemy in an open, limited area. If you move too far away from someone and they get really far off-screen, they'll be deleted and another person just like them will spawn. The annoying thing about this is that it means the health of enemies resets.
Two times, the player must fight in the exact-same arena facing an army of enemies. He gets one ally, and if he moves around too far from the one ally, another will appear, making it seem as if the player has more than one guy helping him. He only faces four enemies at a time, for some reason, even though he's supposed to be fighting a huge army alongside his brothers-in-arms.
The "huge army" stands on a ledge, and every now and then, a soldier will jump down. Now, the huge army is actually just a wall of sprites. It's difficult to tell that the sprites are supposed to represent people, as they're completely frozen and have big, round shields covering their top halves, including their heads. They look like circles with legs. Also, there's not even that many sprites. The sprites would suggest that the huge army is made up of, like... Twenty guys.
There's another scene where the player fights two Persian Champions. In the cutscene, a Spartan goes, "HOLY CRIZZAP! LOOK AT THAT HUGE ARMY OF PERSIANS!" I hadn't even noticed it was supposed to be a huge army I was looking at, as all I could see were two Persian Champions standing in front of what looked like a fence post. As I mentioned above, they don't use very many sprites for the "huge armies", and the sprites don't even look like people all that much, especially because they don't animate at all.
There are actually a lot of cutscenes where thirty, sometimes many more character models will be on-screen at the same time with no slow-down, though you never see that many in-action. The game lingers around one or two teammates maximum (rarely three), and four to six enemies. That's not so bad, but they abuse the "can only be killed when knocked down" guys.
Even in some parts of the game, you can see a big crapload of soldiers standing around and doing nothing in the background, like the Spartans in the first part of the first level. It's as if the AI was so unbelievably advanced that it just took too much memory to make them think. HA HA HA! Hilarious!
The real problem, methinks, is that the blood takes too much memory. On levels where they actually let you cut craploads enemies to pieces, if you kill too many at once, the huge, gushing amounts of blood can slow down the game.
One big problem with the game is that, if you do nothing but upgrade your weapons and armor, you'll be unstoppable. Even the overstrengthened Immortals can be easily cut through. The last armor upgrade makes just about everything do little to no damage. Even the toughest bosses (like Mardonius, who you kill but then mysteriously comes back to life without explanation) can easily be beaten with one try. I KNEW that a lack of changeable difficulty would make some parts too hard and others too easy.
Y'know, not only is Mardonius too easy, but the place the player fights him in is weird, because the player has a big crapload of Spartans with him, then they all mysteriously disappear, and there are a bunch of weirdly frozen, untouchable Immortals that stand perfectly still and face one direction, like creepy, pointless statues. Oh, and a fencepost of sprite soldiers.
Immortals look stupid, too, because they're completely covered in black, but they have bare hands and feet. Just wanted to toss that in there. Y'know, you have to fight two Immortals at completely seperate times as if they were bosses, even though they can be taken out by spears with great ease, and later in the game, you have to fight entire armies of them, anyway.
A lot of enemies that you encounter throughout the game, sometimes you'll only meet them in one part of one level and never meet them again. The Wicker Grunts, for example, come in very small numbers in one part of one level of the game, and once you pass that part of the level, you only see a few more on the same level, and slay some when you're in a phalanx. Otherwise, you never see them again.
Persian Generals are also rare. You fight about... I don't know, seven of them throughout the game. They're really easy.
What I'm getting at is, they make you fight way too many of the same kinds of enemies, and not enough of others.
Upon beating levels, you can replay them. Also, upon beating the game, you can select "Continue", which has a plus sign for some reason. When choosing either of these options, you have all of your upgrades that you achieved in later levels. Like, you can use the double swords on levels where you didn't have them before.
Just because Continue has a plus sign next to it doesn't mean anything gets more difficult. You're even more powerful than you should be, so enemies are ridiculously and unfairly easy to kill. There's absolutely no challenge to replaying levels. You just have to start the game all over again if you want to play a "memorable" level of yours with any challenge.
I remember, when watching the game's trailer, that there was a part where the player fights an enemy on top of an elephant. That never happens in the actual game.
Aside from committing mass murder to pass the time, you can hunt for "lambda" signs which access unlockable pictures. They're really easy to find, often out in the open, as obvious as can be. Sometimes, you have to do special things to make them appear, like successfully maintaining stealth. I never found any encouragement to find hidden lambdas because they only unlock pictures, and I've never played a single game in my life in which I wanted to unlock the unlockable pictures, much less look at them. All of the movies are unlocked from the beginning, and movies are the only things I can ever be bothered to want to unlock.
Beyond the lambda signs, the game is incredibly linear, as far as I've played. Now, I don't mind at all. This game reminds me of the Lord of the Rings games (by EA Games), where everything goes in a rather linear order. You have to do this and then a cutscene plays and then you have to do this, all the while beating the crap out of enemies, hopefully with comrades by your side.
Despite my complaints, I LOVE this game, and this kind of gameplay. 300: March to Glory is the kind of game I could play over and over and over, despite the lack of any actual replay value. Some people, however, don't like the kind of gameplay beat-'em-ups feature, especially when everything is so very pre-defined. I find it to be really addictive. And not addictive like I could play it for hours on end, but addictive like, after putting it down, I'd want to pick it up again.
If you've enjoyed games like The Lord of the Rings (the two games made by EA Games), or the Warriors, or any other amazing beat-'em-ups like those, you can probably get a good kick out 300: March to Glory, even though it's lacking in mulitplayer so you can only enjoy it by yourself, and it doesn't have many replay features like modifiable difficulty or "free-roaming exploration". But, damn, exploration gets pretty boring, anyway.
For a quick laugh, read the second "Statistics" page in the options. If you don't understand some of the statistics, play the game. THEN you'll know what "Number of horses slapped" means.
Don't read any further if you don't want to read any "spoilers", though I'd hardly call them that, as there's not much to spoil.
I was surprised by the last level. I thought the game would end at the anti-climactic battle against Mardonius, since Leonidas dies in a rather sudden and uninteresting way that they don't even bother to show or explain.
However, the game keeps going. You play as some other guy named Delios, who has no helmet and wears an eyepatch. He reminds me of "Big Boss" Snake from Metal Gear Solid.
The last level was such a huge disappointment. They make the player fight an unending swarm of guys that have to be knocked down to kill, and guys that can only be instant-killed. Then, he fights three Generals, one at a time.
The player's allies, in this part of the level and the next, won't move at all unless an enemy hits them. To get an enemy to hit them in the first part, the player must run over to them, stand next to them and hope that an enemy accidentally hits them. THEN his allies suddenly decide to help out.
In the second part, the player can only hope that a charging rhino hits his buddies.
There's no ambience to make it sound like there's a battle going on. The environment is bland and empty. There aren't even corpses lying around, aside from the ones you make yourself. It doesn't look like a decent battlefield. The first level somehow managed to do much better in the department of "epic battle".
There's actually a cool part where the player must fight Mardonius, who's riding on a rhino. However, the player is pestered by two guys that have to be instant-killed, and killing the rhino is WAY too easy. If you somehow can't kill the rhino fast enough, MORE rhinos come out. It had the potential to be a really awesome battle, but the little pestering guys that have to be instant-killed and the speed at which Mardonius' rhino dies ruins it completely.
Oh, yeah, did I mention you have to fight Mardonius AGAIN? It looked like he died the first time I fought him, but apparently, you CAN live after you're stabbed so many times you could be used as a screen door.
Upon the death of his rhino, he decides to fight on foot.
When fighting him again, he's just as stupidly easy as he was the first time. I thought it was cool how he used the boss music from the first level whenever you fight him for the first time, but when he uses the same song again for the final boss fight, that screams cheap, half-assedness. The only difference in this second fight is that he can take his spear in half to use it as double-swords, do a couple of easily avoided moves, then put it back together as a spear. It's not at all interesting or challenging. He's so stupidly easy. The environment in which you fight him is so serene that it's impossible to tell that there's supposed to be a battle going on.
I don't know. The whole thing just made me sick. The game had a lot of cool moments, especially with the first level, then it builds up to an extremely crappy last level with the easiest, anti-climactic boss fight of them all in the most boring environment possible.
Xerxes, the super-badguy of the whole game, has like three lines of his own, you only see him twice, and he NEVER gets what's coming to him. I mean, the way the 300 Spartans and King Leonidas die is, Leonidas throws a spear at Xerxes (which misses), then Xerxes girlishly points towards Leonidas, and a bunch of arrows fly over Xerxes' head towards Leonidas. Then the level ends, and the cutscene shows a silhouette of Leonidas' decapitated head. Since when were arrows ever a problem? I blocked billions of them throughout the entire game by just holding up my shield!
Then Mardonius, who mysteriously survives the fight against Leonidas, leads the attack of the Persians against the Spartans in the non-epic, uninteresting, anti-climactic last level. Then he dies, and it says, "The Persians left, never to return," just because one guy died. One really weak guy that was no trouble at all to beat.
And still, Xerxes never gets what's coming to him. I'm sure this whole ending part with Leonidas' death and Mardonius' death and Xerxes' sudden defeat without him ever getting what's coming to him is all actually conveyed very well in the movie itself, but in the game, it just left me confused and pissy.
I really liked playing this game from start to near-finish, but it's loaded with so many crappy parts, too many difficult-to-kill enemies, and the worst ending I could've imagined. Not even a decent or interesting final boss fight.
Y'know, you never hear much about the hunchback who betrays Leonidas just because Leonidas didn't let the hunchback fight the Persians with him. Seems kind of ridiculous that he'd want to fight Persians, then he'd want to join the Persians just because Leonidas wouldn't let him join the Spartans to fight the Persians.
You're REALLY meant to watch the movie to understand half of the stuff in the game. The cutscenes are great, but a lot of crap isn't explained all that well outside of them.