t’s appropriate that the three starring characters of this first PSP Medal of Honor game are all protagonists from earlier incarnations of the series. Everything about Heroes feels like a rehash of old concepts, even if this is effectively a new game. As a full-on PSP FPS that manages to work and control moderately well, that may be enough to satisfy some players. The rest of us, meanwhile, are going to feel like we’ve seen this game a hundred times before, and not only are we ready for something new, but we’ve played that something new in the form of other, better titles.

The single-player campaign has you shooting your way through various battle sites in the European theater of World War II. The missions and characters are forgettable, which is unfortunate since the use of previous game heroes could have allowed for some fun character growth. As it is, whether you’re playing one or the other barely enters your consciousness. Instead, you’re left to focus on how slowly your character meanders through the world and how terrible the AI on your fellow nameless soldiers is. Guys, when I set an explosive charge, standard military procedure does not, in point of fact, suggest that you haphazardly run towards the blast radius until you die a fiery death. And you Nazi dummies aren’t any better as you wildly charge my entrenched machine gun as one after another of you falls beneath its hail. More than that, objectives are by-the-numbers fetch quests or area domination jobs, some of which actually double as multiplayer levels, which kind of blows.

On the other hand, it’s hard for me to not praise the juicy multiplayer modes themselves, where full-on 32-player matches can be played online, or eight of your friends can play together in an ad hoc network. These matches are almost all game types that will feel overly familiar, but it’s definitely cool to have a large scale FPS multiplayer option like this that works well on the PSP. There’s a little slowdown and some questionable spawn points, but it’s a small price to pay for the chance to play through some titanic conflicts.

There’s nothing fundamentally broken about EA’s latest milking of their World War II franchise, but neither is there a great deal that will blow you away. It’s a retread of familiar territory in every way, such that a game like this five years ago would have had me reeling, but now leaves me feeling flat.