Bounty Hounds (PSP)
Posted by 7th on March 02, 2007

Title: Bounty Hounds
System: Playstation Portable
Genre: Dungeon Crawler In Space
7th Score: 7/10

I know it's been a while since I did one of these... along, long, long while. What can I say? I haven't been gaming near as much as I used to, so getting out the latest game review hasn't exactly been one of my higher priorities.

But I got to looking at our archive, and noticed that our arcade section could really use some beefing up (as could the library, but I have even less time for casual reading than I do for gaming, because hey, gaming is more fun.)

This is primarily because I let my commitment to the games section lag quite a bit when Morphine Jim came on board and started gracing us with his excellent game reviews, and he's currently away for the most part working on real-life projects and being the overly sociable snarky bastard we all know and love. Spooky and Dave have made valiant attempts, but until their military situations become somewhat more stable, I've decided to TRY and get at least one new game review up each week in addition to whatever material is posted in our weekly update, as well, the section just needs it.

I love a good hack n' slasher. And even more than that, I loved Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast. It was an amazing game for its time, with 3D hi-res graphics, online team play, an online community area to buy weapons, power ups, etc, and a fantastic sci-fi world to explore.

Of course, the Dreamcast suffered a premature burial, and the series didn't resurface until the Gamecube came out, but it just didn't seem the same, especially when they started inserting card battling into the game engine. (And yes, I know it's coming out for Xbox 360, but I don't own one.)

Flash forward five years or so, and I happen by Gamestop one day and notice one of the clerks playing something on his PSP that looks an awful lot like Phantasy Star Online.

As it so happens, it was Bounty Hounds. In this title, you play Maximillian, an intergalactic "bounty hound." Along with his cohorts, his job is to infiltrate alien worlds as a sort of interplanetary canary and weed out/eliminate any potential dangers before colonization.

The humans are at war with a seemingly evil race of robotic alien creatures called ETI's, but none of that really matters. You'll find youself zipping past the plot, since it's all handled by comic book style static cinemas with written text instead of spoken dialogue, and who wants to spend their video game time READING anyway? Hasn't the government figured out yet that we're all a bunch of braindead frag-a-holics just looking for the next great cyberkill? Something that actually motivates us to read, and heaven forbid, think, just isn't worth our time.

But I digress.

In a lot of advance reviews I read before purchasing this game, I repeatedly saw the same thing: "Monster Hunter In Space." Yes and no. In all honesty, it reminds me more of Phantasy Star Online, which in itself was a sort of sci-fi 3D Diablo. You have a central hub that will bring on Deja Vu to anyone who played PSO. You have a similar weapon system, same method of going from ship to planet, similar leveling up scheme, similar use of particle effects and neon lighting.

If anything, I'd say this game is a cross between Phantasy Star Online's RPG elements and visual style, Dynasty Warrior's frenetic pace and "must kill everything that moves" feel, the sci-fi gunplay of Koei's Crimson Sea 2, and if nothing else, a refined and much honed clone of Monster Hunter's control scheme and wonky camera system.

Oh yes indeedy, the camera sucks, mostly because the PSP is missing that so desperately needed second analog nub. You will spend this game continually hitting the button to recenter your camera, only for it to eventually worm its way back to a "facing your character" viewpoint, as though the engine thinks if it moves slow enough, you won't notice.

It doesn't really cause a problem, since your combo moves hit everything around you in a 360 degree radius, but it would be nice to be able to, you know, SEE what it is you're attacking without having to constantly keep centering the view.

Weapons are plentiful, and powerful. There are lots of fun ways to fuck up the bad guys in this title, though you'll spend more time using your melee weapon than you will ranged armaments.

You also have bomb-like super weapons that can potentially damage numerous enemies at once, but I found myself rarely using them because it required me to runaway from the thick of the action to a safe distance before setting them off. Let me tell you somthing. When your camera is playing musical chairs around your character, you try to keep the bad guys in the center of the screen as much as possible.

There's also a shield mechanic at play here that casts a shield either over you, or over a creature you wish to keep at a distance. It doesn't seem to really accomplish much either way other than to look really cool, so I haven't made much use of it one way or another.

As mentioned above, the power up system is simple, effective, and seemingly inspired by games like Champions of Norath and Untold Legends. You can sell things you find for money to buy what you need, etc etc etc etc go kill bad guys with your new bad assery to get more items to sell to buy better equipment so you can go kill bad guys with your new badassery rinse and repeat.

Short of maybe Portable Ops, Bounty Hounds has possibly the best graphics on the system. Sharp and detailed, with minimal slowdown. Buying new armor changes the look of your character dramatically, and the new weapons are plainly visible in his hands and change in real time when switching from one to another. The environments are large for a portable title, are not randomly generated, but in some levels still feels like "box maze dressed up to look like a jungle," similar to the fake looking Wonderland Forest level in Kingdom Hearts.

So there you have it. Short of some moderately repetitive gameplay (which won't be a problem for fans of games like this) and a twitchy camera, Bounty Hounds is a good as hack and slash gets. For those of you wishing for PSO Portable, this is as close as you're going to get. And I noticed recently that it's dropped in price to about 20 bucks at Gamestop, so you have no excuse.