Call of Duty: Roads to Victory - The PSP FPS!

What is Call of Duty: Roads to Victory on PSP? A World War II–era CoD built for the PSP when the brand was still strongly associated with WWII, months before the franchise’s modern pivot with Call of Duty 4. The tone is part hands-on demo, part hardware commentary—focusing on how one analog stick and face-button aiming shape the experience, with auto-aim doing a lot of work.

About the game

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory is a World War II first-person shooter developed by Amaze Entertainment and published by Activision—the first and only Call of Duty title built specifically for the PlayStation Portable. It landed in North America on March 13, 2007, with European and Australian releases following on March 30, just months before Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare rewrote what the franchise could be on consoles.

The game is often described as a spinoff of Call of Duty 3, sharing the same WWII theater but scaled for a handheld with a single analog stick and no second stick for look. That hardware ceiling is the through-line for everything below—from the face-button aiming in our video to the mixed reviews it earned at launch.

PSP controls and limitations

• Movement: left analog stick.
• Look / aim: face buttons (△ ○ × □), not a second stick—described as awkward but a creative way to ship CoD on the hardware.
• D-pad: Right — cycle weapons; Left — reload (even with a full magazine possible); Down — crouch; Up — grenades (confirmed mid-play).
• Left shoulder: aim down sights (PSP has one set of bumpers, no triggers).
• No sprint.
• Auto-aim is called out repeatedly as making the setup playable despite the control scheme; looking with face buttons stays difficult even with assists.

Release and place in the series

• Released March 2007 — only a few months before CoD 4 (fall 2007); framed as the first and only PSP installment in this style.
• Described as a spinoff of Call of Duty 3.
• Compared to PS Vita’s Black Ops Declassified (dismissed as poor) and to DS CoD ports that Andy plans to look at later.
• Mentions Black Ops Declassified sometimes bundled a download voucher for this title (confirmed—see Vita second life below).
• For another WWII shooter retrospective, see What Happened to Medal of Honor?

Structure and modes

• Three separate campaigns (stated explicitly).
• No multiplayer option noticed in the menu during our session (see multiplayer below—the game does ship with ad hoc modes).
• Explosive barrels can be shot for effect.

Campaigns across three fronts

Roads to Victory spreads its single-player content across 14 missions in three national campaigns—American, Canadian, and British—each tied to real WWII operations rather than a single continuous story. Some battles show up in more than one campaign from a different army’s perspective, which gives the package more variety than a straight port of one console campaign might have offered.

• American campaign: Operation Market Garden, Operation Avalanche, and Operation Detroit.
• Canadian campaign: Battle of the Scheldt, Operation Infatuate, and Operation Blockbuster.
• British campaign: Operation Market Garden and Operation Varsity.

Market Garden appears in both the American and British arcs—a famous 1944 airborne push into the Netherlands that shows up constantly in WWII shooters of this era. The Canadian thread is a nice rarity for the genre: Scheldt, Infatuate, and Blockbuster cover fighting around the Scheldt estuary and the push into the Netherlands, operations that do not always get screen time next to D-Day and the Bulge. If you are replaying for history rather than just nostalgia, switching campaigns is worth it.

Multiplayer (ad hoc)

Beyond the three solo campaigns, Roads to Victory includes local wireless multiplayer—up to six players over PSP ad hoc on nine maps. Modes include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Hold the Flag, and King of the Hill. That is a respectable spread for a 2007 handheld, even if finding six friends with PSPs in the same room was always the hard part.

We did not surface multiplayer in the menu during our playthrough, so either it sits off the main path or needs a second system nearby to set up. If you still have two PSPs and this UMD (or a digital copy), ad hoc is one of the main reasons collectors keep the disc around.

Playthrough beats (reference moments)

• Early segment: defensive shooting against waves that feel like they spawn in front of the player—more about tolerating the loop than deep tactics.
• Machine gun nest / mounted weapon sequence (door blown open to progress).
• Sniper segment with Springfield; holding breath / lining up a shot discussed; spotting targets and allied artillery call based on coordinates (radio / “call out coordinates” style objective).
• Mission wrap: celebration / planes, medal awarded—used as a clean endpoint for the session.

Weapons and feel

• Andy sticks to Thompson over MP40 for preference.
• Overall verdict in the video: not the best or worst CoD; harder than it looks in places; workable thanks to aim assist and pacing.

What critics said at launch

Contemporary reviews landed in the “decent handheld effort, compromised controls” bucket—roughly the same read our playthrough suggests. Aggregators and outlets at the time were not harsh, but they were not enthusiastic either.

• IGN: 6.6 / 10 — functional WWII action on PSP, held back by the input model.
• GameSpot: 6.2 / 10 — similar verdict on scope and feel.
• GameSpy: 2.5 / 5 — called out weak AI and a presentation that did not sustain past the first impression.

Recurring complaints mirror what you feel in the video: a clumsy control scheme (face buttons doing look duty, D-pad handling weapon and stance actions), spotty AI, and occasional glitches—architecture popping out, getting stuck on geometry. None of that makes the game unplayable, but it explains why Roads to Victory is remembered as a curiosity rather than a classic.

PlayStation Vita second life

Roads to Victory got an unexpected encore on PlayStation Vita. Buyers of Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified received a download voucher for the PSP title, playable on Vita through backward compatibility when the handheld launched in November 2012. That bundle is the detail Andy was unsure about in the video—and it is one of the easier ways to experience the game today if you missed the UMD the first time around.

Platform / ecosystem asides (from commentary)

• PSP had no trophy support; tangent on first-party PSP library vs PS Vita (e.g. Killzone Mercenary vs Killzone Liberation; God of War PSP pair; Gran Turismo PSP; LittleBigPlanet PSP; Resistance spin-off; GTA Chinatown Wars)—contrasted with Switch-era “full” portable ports.
• Footage captured via Steam Deck (emulation / playback setup for the video).