Guilty Gear: Judgement is the long-awaited PlayStation Portable offering in the prestigious Guilty Gear series. With THQ bringing both Guilty Gear: Judgement  for the PSP and Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers for the NintendoDS to Europe finally, fans of the series have reason to be joyful.

The title is split into two separate games, Guilty Gear: Judgement and Guilty Gear X2 Reload. Guilty Gear: Judgement contains Story Mode and Survival, where there are Levels set-out as a Scrolling Beat-‘Em-Up, in which you must battle all enemies, similar to games such as Double Dragon, Altered Beast and Streets of Rage – there is a very arcade-esque feel to the game.

Story Mode takes you through stages where you have to destroy everything that moves. Villagers have been going missing and you are going to investigate the strange happenings that are going on. At the end of each Level you are graded on Bonus, Max Combo and Life totalled together to give your Score. The first Level is in Liberia, the second in Ashnay, the third in Ksanaka, the fourth Tower of Wind, the fifth Underworld and finally the sixth Castle. The first two Stages are fairly simple, walk through Levels where you must defeat all enemies. The third stage is a Boss Level in which you must destroy heads on a revolving wall. From this point on the Stages become increasingly more difficult and you experience different and larger monsters that seem a lot stronger than previously. In the third Stage you come across a book in a laboratory that gives you a little more plot. It explains that the person that wrote it can see a way to be God and that he needs to have a place that is secluded so that he can do experiments, and rule all that live there.

In the traditional manner, when you have lost all of your lives it is Game Over, but the game’s Menu System requires you to go back to Level Select in Story Mode and put yourself back to the furthest point in-order to progress, rather than just offering the option of a Continue System, which would save many of the Loading Screens when going out and back into the game. Once a Level is completed, it’s then added to the Level Select Screen, from which you can replay any Level.

When you first begin the game there are only five characters to play as. During the story you meet up with three characters which become available to play with. The characters that you meet are different from the five characters that you begin the game with, eventually unlocking all of the characters.

There is a Survival Mode which keeps battling you against different enemies. This is a real challenge and you will find out quickly that different characters are better at different things making some enemies easy to defeat and others near impossible.

Guilty Gear X2 Reload contains six different Modes. Arcade battles you through a certain number of opponents – beat them all to win. M.O.M. (Medal Of Millionaire) rewards you for combination moves, the more combination attacks that you do the higher the score. VS CPU battles you against computer controlled players, in exhibition matches; you have the choice which character you would like to be and you select your opponent. Training Mode allows you to choose a character to fight as and a character to beat-up (your enemy does not fight back). It allows you to familiarise yourself with your special moves and combination attacks. Survival Mode plays you against computer characters one after another. Bosses are also challengers in this stage and the better that you do, the better that the computer plays making it a very difficult part of the game. Once you have defeated an opponent you move straight to the next and only receive a small amount of energy replenishment. Guilty Gear X2 Reload is really there for Multi-Player against friends. This is a brilliant part of the game that will have friends arguing for hours.

The graphics work really well. They are well defined and it is clear that the backgrounds have been drawn (extremely well) and then imported into the game. The animation of the Characters is very good, you know that you are playing a new game but it has a very retro feel to it. The music is rocking and repetitive but adds atmosphere to the game - it makes you want to keep beating-up the enemies. The sound effects are what are needed in a game such as this, simple but effective and very responsive.

All-in-all, this is a great arcade-style game that has an amazing retro feel to it. As games like Street Fighter, Final Fight and Streets of Rage it will have you hooked. Playing against the computer is fun, playing against friends is amazing and will have mates setting-up tournaments all over the World.