GamersInfo.net

Thanks to a varied and exciting selection of games the PSP has acquired a reputation of being a somewhat oddball and intriguing handheld option — just look at LocoRoco and Lumines for evidence of the brilliant and original games that are being released for Sony’s handheld.

Patapon, then, is in good company: a 2D RTS merged with a rhythm-action game and controlled with drum beats. It may sound strange, but don’t let that put you off, as it’s also excellent.

The story is charming, but relatively inconsequential. The tribe of eyeballs-with-legs known as Patapon have embraced you as their god, and are waging a war against the evil Zigotons over land, territory and dominance. It’s your job to guide the brave tribe of little folk to victory.

Missions take place on a side-scrolling landscape where the land is a mere silhouette of solid black. Everything else — trees, rocks, the backdrops and buildings — are drawn in an utterly charming cartoon style that doesn’t exude detail but is entirely enjoyable. Peripheral characters, and the main protagonists, are mostly black, too. Small swathes of colour are all that’s given over to identifying them, but it’s enough.

Control is, like the graphics, simple. Each of the four PlayStation buttons controls a drum: pata, pon, chaka and don. Different combinations of these drums can be pressed in call-and-return fashion to compel your Patapons into action. For instance, pressing pata-pata-pata-pon makes your warriors walk forward — you press, they sing back, then you press again, and it carries on. Pon-pon-pata-pon, for instance, makes them attack. There’s also codes for defending and inciting miracles.

It’s simple enough to get to grips with, and oodles of fun to use. Hit enough combinations in a row and you’ll activate fever mode, where the Patapons dance more, attack more, and are more ferocious in defence. Get into Fever mode and maintain it throughout a mission and you have a significant advantage. The only problem with the drum system is that it’s limited — there’s only a handful of patterns available and you really want more to explore and exploit it.

In between missions, the Patapons hang out in the brilliantly-named Patapolis — their home. Here, a group of them seem permanently drunk, and there are a few facilities for bolstering your troops. Only three units of six troops can be deployed at any one time, and so it’s vital to learn when to retire certain troops so you can hire better ones, thereby strengthening your forces.

Troops are born at Mater, the Tree of Life. There isn’t a huge number of troop categories, but they’re all customisable: when a standard Tatapon — an axe wielding maniac of a soldier — is created from a branch and some stone, using other materials will yield a different type of soldier. Using different tree branches or different stones, for instance, yields a soldier with varying abilities, which allows you to tailor your forces to personal preferences. They can be brilliant defenders, for instance, or lethal in attack. Or just very quick, in order to run away.

Various minigames are also available to earn materials to use in recruiting troops. They exhibit the same infectious and high level of imagination that runs through the whole game, and ask you to do fun and random things to earn materials. One, for example, tasks you with playing a trumpet along to the song of a dancing tree. Another asks you to play with a baby mountain called Rumble Thump — by using his toes as xylophone keys — and a third indulges your culinary side by helping the village chef whip up a casserole.

It’s undoubtedly a brilliant little title, but Patapon is quite quick to show its limits: missions tend to revolve around standard RTS tasks, such as attacking, defending or stealing. There are hunting missions available to bolster your forces and earn materials, as well as boss fights, but these aren’t too different, either. The lack of further drum rhythms is also annoying, if only because you want more to use.

Still, this is one of the best games on PSP, and has made a genre work on the little console that’s been sorely under-represented up until now. As you’d expect, the music is rhythmic and entertaining, and the gameplay itself is excellent. It’s a cute graphical title, too, and should be in the library of any self-respecting PSP owner.