PSP World

No Gravity Review

No Gravity: The Plague of Minds is a space shooter in the tradition of classics like Wing Commander, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, and Rogue Squadron. It's a PSP game available exclusively as a downloadable through the PlayStation Network for $9.99. The game was birthed from the indie scene by Realtech VR and published by Anozor SARL. For a special inside look at the game's development, check out our interview with the developers here.

The story takes place far in the future. It's the year 8002 and your homeworld has been ravaged by a strange disease. Piloting through 31 missions, you'll uncover the secret of how people are being mind-controlled. You can choose between 3 ships, plus 2 more unlockable ships, each armed with lasers and missiles. Your job: Free your people by freeing their minds.

Flying through space in either first- or third-person view, you will navigate to your mission's destination point by engaging auto-pilot. Each mission has a simple task like patrol duty, escort duty, scavenge lost cargo containers, or destroy enemy ships.

If you've ever played a space shooter before, the controls will be instantly familiar. Engage thrust to outflank enemies or use it to catch up to their tales. Do barrel rolls with your left and right shoulder buttons to evade enemy fire.

Laser canons are your main weapons, although you have a limited supply of missiles. Be sure to grab power-ups to refuel your thrust, regain health, or max out your firepower. Saving up your power-ups definitely plays up the strategy element when there is only a limited amount available.

The physics are sound. You get a real sense of speed flying through space and it's very satisfying to blow up enemies, especially taking down huge battle cruisers. We wished there was a speedometer though. You can lock on targets by tapping the circle button. This is important since locking on a target will activate aim-assist, a feature that will help you out a lot since you're playing a shooter on a small screen.

Missions typically last between 5-15 minutes, which is great for short bus rides to school or work. The difficulty level is not too hard, allowing seasoned pilots to plow through a mission in one or two tries. There are special missions that move the story forward every 5 missions. These event missions may take a few tries to figure out, but once you do, you can beat it in less than 15 minutes.

Late in the game, you will gain the Ion Blaster. This is our favorite weapon because it is super powerful during dogfights. The halo effect of the ion burst is also a nice example of the game's beautiful graphics. The graphics are a major draw for this game.

For such a small download, the game packs in lots of impressive special effects. The games runs at a smooth frame-rate and there isn't any slowdown, even during hectic battles. This traditionally has been a downfall for classic space shooters like Wing Commander and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter where the action slows down to a crawl when things got hot and heavy. Not so in No Gravity.

Technical feats aside, there are still room for improvement. We find it pretty annoying during the container retrieval missions that you have to rely on the beeping of your scanners to locate these hard to see pick-ups. Most of our time during these missions was wasted in looking for these containers. It would have been so much easier if they appeared on your radar as a uniquely colored blip.

Also, it would be a great help if ships and structures that appear in your scanner would have their name displayed somewhere. It would have made finding and completing mission objectives that much easier if we knew we were firing on the right object.

It's cool that depending on which path you choose during the last mission, you may get an additional mission to play through. The normal ending is in mission 30, while a special ending awaits you in mission 31. We wished that results of individual missions had a greater impact on the storyline.

Character development is non-existent, so branching paths would have made the game more compelling and get the gamer invested in each mission's outcome. Wing Commander employed this trick to much success. It would have been great if there was a multiplayer mode as well.

As an indie game, the developers of No Gravity have many reasons to be proud. The game is enjoyable and a nostalgic throwback to the simpler days of gaming. It's low difficulty makes it a great game to occupy time during your commute. Not the best in its class or an in-depth space shooter, but for some fun diversion, it's definitely worth picking-up for $9.99.

.