A solid and well balanced turn-based strategy title complete with online play.

While there have been a few portable turn-based strategy titles in the past, Nintendo's Advance Wars series has repopularized the genre as of late. Over the past year, Sony Online Entertainment was hard at work on Field Commander a similar-styled title for the PSP. While it's clear that the game borrows somewhat heavily from Nintendo's series, there is enough unique content and features to give it its own identity.

In a nutshell - players take the role of a field commander working for an independent organization, ATLAS, established by the Allied Nations, to defend the world against an evil terrorist organization known as "Shadow Nation," which is bent on inciting wars, dealing illicit arms and global domination. With an arsenal of 15 army divisions and 11 commanding officers from which to choose, players can command the land, skies and sea.

Field Commander is built upon your typical turn-based strategy formula; two armies, an environmental battlefield, a number key capture points, and a simple goal. The game is built around 30+ single-player missions, all taking place in a variety of locations and weather conditions. You begin the game with a couple of divisions within your army, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. As you progress through the game, more divisions are unlocked along with additional maps, missions and units. The goals for each mission range from the typical "capture enemy HQ or destroy all enemy units", to "destroy enemy convoy before they escape the area", with the former being the most common. The maps and missions are surprisingly well thought out, and the battles are rarely a pushover or frustratingly difficult. SOE went a bit overboard with the 15 army divisions, as besides different names/logos and special abilities, they are not that distinct from one another. Just 4 or 5 would have been more than enough variety, but I digress. The units in the game are diverse and well balanced, and includes submarines, battleships, ground infantry, tanks, stealth units, bombers, helicopters and quite a bit more. While looking visually different, both friendly and enemy units are identical in function with only the particular army divisions utilized influencing their abilities.

Being the powerful little handheld that it is, Sony Online Entertainment decided to forgo your typical 2-dimensional tiled maps and animated sprites for organic environments and detailed polygon/texture-mapped units. Though overall, the look/feel of the game varies greatly. The 2D art, user interface, and menu screens are ugly, strangely low resolution, and cheap looking. Which is in stark contrast with the actual in-game visuals, which are crisp, nicely animated, well designed and eye pleasing. The inconsistent nature of the art direction is a little jarring, but the good far outweighs the bad.

SOE made an attempt to work a little storyline into the game, complete with fully voiced characters and a script, but it's really very forgettable. The voice acting isn't bad, and the soundtrack and effects are fitting and interesting enough.

The single player campaign is Field Commander is actually quite long with some missions taking upwards of an hour or so. The game allows you to save/load at any point during a mission, as many times as you'd like, and one of the game's hints actually encourages you to do so. By default, the game uses a cinematic swooping camera and set of animations to show off the various unit attacks, and it looks awfully pretty. The only problem is, during the longer missions, it slows down the pacing and the additional couple of seconds per attack begins to add up. SOE included the ability to skip the animations manually or automatically at any time, and it really speeds up the pace of the game dramatically.

The insanely deep multiplayer mode is actually a pretty big selling point for the game as well, and it works very well with turn-based strategy titles. Field Commander utilizes the PSP's WiFi features for both local (Ad-Hoc) versus and internet (Infrastructure) play, and there's no doubt that it increases the game's replayability tenfold. Besides the four modes of play, there are also online leaderboards and rankings, along with the ability to create, upload and share your own missions/maps from within the game. The online gaming was smooth and lag-free from my experiences, but like a competitive game of chess, it requires a bit of time to play through an entire match.

Field Commander does exactly what it set out to accomplish; provide a solid, portable, turn-based military strategy title. The single and multiplayer modes provide many hours of gameplay, and you'll definitely get your money's worth. There are a few small quirks that keep it from being a truly great strategy experience, but I'd expect future installments to take care of that.