Tehra: Dark Warrior

PSP Minis have never been known for their length or pacing, so take it to heart that Tehra: Dark Warrior does enough to warrant me opening a review by saying that it refutes the current PSP Mini conventions by being a rather broad game. The game is broken up into several chapters and each chapter is broken up into several levels (or ‘parts’), breaking the game up nicely with checkpoints and a surprisingly long story campaign. I was genuinely shocked at how much work had gone into the length of the story mode and the boss battles contained within.

That praise out of the way, however, the story itself  just tends to call on one or two too many fantasy clichés. You play as a scantily clad woman called Tehra with more ass on show than Paris Hilton on a bender, who’s an assassin created to enforce a treaty between humans and demons by having their blood forged into her body. Naturally, the treaty has gone totally tits up and it’s now Tehra’s (your) duty to use her tits and giant sword to put the demon menace back in place by slicing them into infinity. The plot, in short, isn’t going to be winning any awards but it’s a standard enough affair to drive us through the campaign and give us plenty of excuses to kill various flavours of demon spawn.

As I was thrust into the world of Sistar I was greeted with a brief combat tutorial which at first I thought had glitched, but turned out to be a single attack button and single magic button. Mash square for sword and mash circle for magic until everything you want dead has been killed. Though you are able to upgrade both your physical attacks and magic spells through gold you find as you go along, it feels rather pointless as nearly all the game revolves around the melee attacks which can only be upgraded twice and then left to fend for itself. The magic on the other hand has many upgrades, but nearly all the enemies are immune by the second chapter so you’re left with a magic strike which throws your enemies back (which you will use A LOT!) and then hammer square like an amphetamine riddled chimp.

I can understand the simplicity though, it’s a downloadable hack and slash game for a portable device, because it plays to the strength that it doesn’t necessarily need more to achieve its goal of entertainment on the go. Which is why I must now moan about the hit detection. A lot of the time this wasn’t a major issue, but too often I found myself helplessly swiping at the air because the skeleton archer who was busily arrowing me to a slow and frustrating death was one or two pixels out of my reach and my fixed camera position was unable to show me this.

When the hit detection and fixed camera work together in unison then the button mashing is quite satisfying, which is very helpful as several rooms have enemies constantly respawning until you complete a certain task, so the repetitive slaying of the same enemies doesn’t dampen the experience to the point of tedium. The graphics are also extremely impressive for the platform, with fluent animation, a constant smooth frame-rate and impressive graphics for a PSP Mini. Tehra’s ass constantly bouncing in your face is all the better with the graphic engine being up to par for the genre. The difficulty curve, though, is without a doubt the game’s largest flaw.

Such a large flaw, in fact, that I must dedicate an entire paragraph to it. There are no difficulty settings in Tehra: Dark Warrior. No easy, no medium, just the game’s pick up and go difficulty and the balance is broken. I know it’s possible to complete, but I had to take many breaks from the game to stop myself smashing the device into my own skull as I failed the same seemingly never ending corridor of respawning enemies for the 55th time. There aren’t any mid-level checkpoints, but most levels don’t take too long to run through – unless of course you die, and you will die. You won’t even die in the satisfying ‘Oh no, I’m going to beat this game just to prove to it I can’ kind of way, you’ll die because the enemies won’t stop spawning, or because the (very, very, very cheap) skeleton archers are slowly picking off your health while you’re busy dealing with a giant orc who’s immune to all magic so you have to hammer the square button until you give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome.

It’s a real shame because were there different difficulty boundaries to choose from at the beginning of the game then I would say that Tehra: Dark Warrior would be a must have for any PSP Mini fan. As it stands, I would say that it’s pros do outweigh the cons, but if you’re easily angered and any criticism I have dealt out leads you to doubt if it’s worth it for you or not, I’d think twice. Keep in mind though that as far as PSP Minis go, this is most likely the best one I’ve played so far, the frustration and difficulty aside.