11 Best PSP Action Games

Unlike the card-based Metal Gear Acid games before it, Portable Ops plays like the main series, with series creator Hideo Kojima acting as producer. The year is 1970, six years after Snake Eater, and Naked Snake has been captured in Colombia by the renegade FOX unit. Instead of going it alone, you build a four-man squad out of enemy soldiers you knock out and drag to a waiting vehicle. You could even recruit soldiers by taking the PSP to Wi-Fi hotspots.

Critics loved it, and it scored 87 out of 100 on Metacritic. Players mostly treat it as the warm-up for Peace Walker, which they call the better of the two, and a few warn that the camera controls take some getting used to.

Dark Mirror is the fifth Syphon Filter and a sequel to The Omega Strain, made for the PSP with a PS2 version after it. It was the last game the Sony team in Oregon made before it took the name Bend Studio. Gabe Logan is back, with Lian Xing in some missions, and after the open, sprawling Omega Strain the series goes back to linear levels. You can now hide against walls and shoot around corners, though the famous roll is gone.

Online, up to 8 players could fight it out, with three factions in team deathmatch. Players call Dark Mirror and Logan's Shadow seriously underrated, and they nearly always recommend the two as a pair. Gabe Logan has not been this good since the PS1 days.

Roads to Victory is a Second World War first-person shooter from Amaze Entertainment, released by Activision on March 13, 2007, and it is the first and only Call of Duty made for the PSP. Its 14 levels each take place during a real operation, and it gives the Canadians a campaign of their own. The Canadian missions take you through the Battle of the Scheldt and Operation Blockbuster.

Critics were lukewarm, with 64 out of 100 on Metacritic, and they picked on glitches and a clumsy control scheme that has the buttons doing the work of the arrows and vice versa. With one analog nub, a first-person shooter is always a fight with the controls. Players are kinder: those who played it say it is worth a playthrough and controls better than you would fear, and up to 6 players could play it together over ad hoc.

Bloodlines, made by Griptonite Games for Ubisoft, carries straight on from the first Assassin's Creed. A few weeks after that game, Altaïr travels to Cyprus to wipe out the last of the Knights Templar, and the story finally gives Maria Thorpe, the Templar agent he spared, more to do. It came out in November 2009 alongside Assassin's Creed II, and the two games talk to each other: coins you collect in Bloodlines carry over as florins to the bigger game.

To fit on the PSP, the horse riding is gone, the cities of Limassol and Kyrenia are small, and the streets are emptier, which the game explains as nervous locals staying in their homes. That is a very polite way of saying the PSP could not fit any more people. Critics gave it mixed reviews, but players who stuck with it rate it well above its reputation and call it worth picking up.

Retribution is the first Resistance game not made by Insomniac Games: Bend Studio took over, and the story sits between Resistance: Burning Skies and Resistance 2. You play James Grayson, a British marine who finds his brother Johnny partially converted into a Chimera and kills him, as the rules for infected soldiers demand. He deserts, goes on his own war against the Chimera and destroys 26 conversion centres before the British catch him and put him on trial.

Cover works on its own, locking you to a wall as you walk up to it, and there is aim assist, which is how Bend made a shooter work with one nub. If you owned Resistance 2 on PS3, you could even plug the PSP into the TV and play with a DualShock 3. GameTrailers named it the Best PSP Game of 2009, and players call it underrated and far more ambitious than they expected.

Chains of Olympus came from Ready at Dawn, a prequel to the original God of War that reached the PSP on March 4, 2008. Athena sends Kratos after the Sun God Helios, because with Helios gone the Dream God Morpheus has caused many of the gods to slumber. You still fight with the Blades of Chaos, with up to three magical attacks, quick time events for the big kills and the odd puzzle in between.

The PSP has fewer buttons than a PS2 pad, and critics praised how Ready at Dawn rearranged the controls to fit. It became the highest-rated PSP title on Metacritic, and it had sold 3.2 million copies by June 2012. Players have one real complaint, and it is that it is short. More than one of them finished it wishing there was another chapter.

Guerrilla Games moved the camera up for Liberation. The first Killzone was a first-person shooter on the PS2, and this one is a top-down isometric game that plays like a mixture of a shooter and a dungeon crawler. It picks up two months after the first game, with Templar back in the lead, rescuing hostages from the Helghast. It is the only Killzone on the PSP, and along the way you get a tank, a hovercraft and a jetpack.

Critics gave it generally favorable reviews, with one calling it a game that provides a great deal of intense shooting action. Templar can also order a buddy around in some levels. Players count it among their favourite PSP games, praise its story and say nothing else on a handheld plays quite like it.

Ready at Dawn came back for the sixth God of War, which reached the PSP on November 2, 2010. Kratos is still haunted by visions of his mortal past and goes looking for his origins. In Atlantis he finds his mother Callisto, who tells him his brother Deimos is still alive, and the two brothers end up fighting Thanatos, the God of Death, together. Family reunions in this series go about how you would think.

The combat has a lot more to it than Chains of Olympus had, though critics pointed to the general lack of gameplay innovation over that game. Fans did not mind. It became the nineteenth best-selling PSP game of all time, and most players rate it above Chains of Olympus. As one fan put it, the game is "an unbelievable achievement for the hardware".

Liberty City Stories came first, a PSP exclusive in October 2005, set in 1998 as a prequel to Grand Theft Auto III. You play Toni Cipriani, a mobster first introduced in that game, as he works his way up the Leone crime family while the city's Mafia families fight for power. It is the same Liberty City, only earlier: the Callahan Bridge is unfinished, so a ferry is the main link between Staunton Island and Portland.

The PS2 port followed in June 2006 at around half the price, because it could not rip your own music into a custom soundtrack the way the PSP version could. It sold over 8 million copies by March 2008. Players remember being amazed that a whole 3D Grand Theft Auto fit on a PSP, and for many of them it was the first full GTA they could take anywhere.

The PSP had Vice City Stories first, in October 2006, and the PS2 port came in March 2007. It is set in 1984, two years before Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and stars Victor Vance, a minor character from that game, trying to build a criminal empire with his brother Lance. The new idea is the empire system: you take over businesses from rival gangs and run missions for each one to raise your income.

It also looks better than Liberty City Stories, with faster load times and a longer draw distance. It is one of the best-selling PSP games, with over 7 million copies sold. Plenty of players call it the better of the two Stories games, and the most impressive open world on the PSP.

Hideo Kojima wrote, directed and designed Peace Walker himself, and it is the seventh mainline Metal Gear, a narrative sequel to Snake Eater and Portable Ops. In 1974, Snake runs a private army called Militaires Sans Frontières, and when a heavily armed force takes over Costa Rica, Snake and MSF are hired to investigate the threat. The Peace Walker of the title turns out to be an AI-powered nuclear weapon.

Between missions you build up Mother Base, recruiting soldiers and researching gear, and the truck from Portable Ops is gone. Instead you attach the Fulton Recovery System to knocked-out guards and prisoners and they join your army. Most missions can be played with a second player, and up to four players can team up against the giant AI weapons. Players call that co-op some of the best around, and it is a big reason this one sits on top.