5 Best PSP FPS Games

N.O.V.A. started on iOS in December 2009 and reached the PSP as a PlayStation Mini on December 21, 2010. You play Captain Kal Wardin, a retired soldier forced back to active duty to investigate a missing transport, and you spend twelve levels fighting aliens called the Xenos. It is mostly a first-person shooter, with one on-rails driving segment. It takes major cues from Halo and Metroid, and anyone who has seen a Spartan will notice within a minute.

The eight weapons are futuristic versions of the guns in Gameloft's Modern Combat: Sandstorm. The PSP version did not review well: it holds a Metacritic score of 48, against 94 for the iOS original. Players still recommend it, mostly as a small Mini worth the download once you have played the bigger shooters.

Heroes 2 came out on November 13, 2007, a year after the first game, on both the PSP and the Wii. Each version was built from the ground up for its own system. The campaign starts on the Normandy beaches and follows the Battle of Cherbourg, as Berg investigates the German special weapon programs in the area. The PSP version has seven missions, one fewer than the Wii, plus an arcade-style rail shooter mode.

Multiplayer is where it earns its place. The PSP version supports local wireless play for up to 8 players, with modes like Infiltration, a capture the flag mode built around one contested flag. Critics called it average, with a Metacritic score of 69 on the PSP. Players who recommend the first Heroes usually tell you to get both.

Medal of Honor: Heroes was a PSP exclusive and the ninth game in the series, made by the Canadian studio Team Fusion. It came out in North America on October 23, 2006. Its campaigns take place in Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, and each one has its own hero leading a squad. One of them is William Holt from Medal of Honor: European Assault. A typical mission has you blowing something up and stealing enemy intel, and sometimes running back to a set point to escape.

Each level can be finished at bronze, silver or gold, and the better medals raise your rank and unlock real weapons. It scored 71 on Metacritic, the best score of any game on this list. Players call it a pretty good shooter and still put it among the PSP games they would play first.

Roads to Victory is the first and only Call of Duty made for the PSP. Amaze Entertainment made it for Activision, and it came out on March 13, 2007. It splits 14 levels across three national campaigns, and each level is set during a real World War II operation such as Operation Market Garden or the Battle of the Scheldt.

Critics were lukewarm, with a Metacritic score of 64. The Courier Mail called the control scheme clumsy, with "the buttons doing the work of the arrows and vice versa", which sums up the PSP shooter problem in one line. It got a second life in 2012, when a free code for it came with Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified so it could be played on the PS Vita. Players still name it first when someone asks for a PSP shooter, often right next to Medal of Honor.

Konami made Coded Arms for the PSP, and it came out in Japan on June 23, 2005 and in North America on July 6. You play a hacker breaking into AIDA, a combat training simulator that was shut down but kept running on its own, still generating enemies and levels for soldiers who are no longer there. Every level is randomly generated when you enter it, and the last sector, Infinity, has an unlimited number of levels.

Weapons and armor have attributes such as fire or electric. Electric shots overload the robots, and light weapons do the most damage to the bugs that hide in the dark. Critics were mixed, with a Metacritic score of 59, and a sequel, Coded Arms: Contagion, followed in 2007. Players recommend it more than any other PSP shooter, usually as the one to try when you want an FPS on the system.