It is the year 8002 and the Krosso Empire and its many colonies have been struck by a strange mind disease. As the sickness spreads scientists believe that it has come from space so they send a fleet out on a mission to find and stop the source.

 

 

You play as one of three captains and their ships, McCudden is your all rounder, Kazawa has the heavy weapons ship with no speed and Bishop has the nippy but weak ship. Controlling each one comes very naturally to anyone who has played a space shooter in the past and amazingly the PSP handles it quite well. The control nub is your flight stick, the shoulder buttons roll, with a double tap to pull evasive manoeuvres, triangle gives a speed boost, circle locks onto targets, and cross and square fires weapons. The ships speed and brakes are used with the up and down function of the d-pad and this leads to my only problem with the game, when in a dog fight you need to alter the speed to get behind enemies and having manoeuvre and speed mapped to one thumb makes this very hard, causing some fights to be a bit drawn out.

 

There are six episodes to play through, each one consists of about five missions. Most of the missions are broken into sectors, the first tends to be preparation, a little recon or a couple of enemies but the later sectors will have plenty of harder, faster and larger enemies. Space shooters to tend to have the same level layout no matter what game you play and No Gravity is no different. There is the shoot all ships level, investigate levels and the obligatory and frustratingly hard protection levels. No Gravity does bring a few new ideas to the genre with a retrieval mission where you have to rely on a radar beep to locate missing canisters at the same time as fighting off enemies. This turned out to be very hard and required a lot of attempts but made a refreshing change. You are not alone on these battles, most of the missions have you backed up by allied wingmen, and whilst you have no control over them directly, they will attack enemy ships to make your life a bit easier, but be careful not to hit them as they will fire back.

 

Not all levels are based in empty space, some take place around asteroids and over planet surfaces, in fact for such a small download, the amount of variety is staggering. The enemy ships are varied, from space mines and fighters to the larger space cruisers and battle ships, each one has their own unique look and attack. Thankfully you have a healthy selection of weapons available, your basic cannon and homing missiles do not run out of ammo or heat up so you can continually blast away. Certain ships will drop power-ups when destroyed, upgrading your weapons on the fly. The cannon will fire more shots at once and the missile can be upgraded to fire multiple rockets and even a powerful charged wave beam.

 

No Gravity has an in-built achievement system, carrying out certain criteria like finishing a chapter, killing a set amount of enemies or taking down a boss will earn you points and with these you can unlock some game artwork.

 

 

For such a small download from the PSN this game looks great, the huge starships are impressive with their golden lasers and the site of their rockets coming at you from all angles manages to put some home console games to shame. The explosions of enemy ships look stunning on the small screen, this is aided by very little being on display other than a small radar at the top of the screen showing enemies and allies and a few gauges at the bottom, some of which I have no idea yet what they tell me. No Gravity also pulls you in with its sounds, with lots of laser and explosion effects and a soundtrack that sits nicely with the gameplay with it's sci-fi euphoric mix.

 

No Gravity is a well rounded and solid space shooter, a genre that I love and can't recommend enough.