Having proven mightily successful in offering casual gamers an accessible library of titles to play online on a PC or Mac, MumboJumbo has decided that portable gaming devices are perfect platforms to branch out, in order to keep their audience entertained wherever they go, and with two recent quality efforts on the PSP they clearly seem to have gotten off to a roaring start. As the second of MumboJumbo's pair of debut PSP releases (the other being Luxor: The Wrath of Set), Platypus is a fairly basic arcade shoot 'em up, made famous on RealArcade for its easy-to-get-into gameplay and unique claymation-stylized graphics, and thankfully both of these elements have made it over to the PSP fully intact.

Simply put, Platypus is a prototypical side-scrolling shooter, no more no less. Throughout the game's six brief stages you guide Platypus (that's the name of your ship) through the enemy-infested airways of thirty levels, holding down the X button to mow down everything in your path while dodging incoming waves of patterned attacks, all to rack up the highest score you can. Along the way you have the opportunity to collect various power-ups, such as rapid fire, spread shot, rockets, sonic wave and lighting blasts, which come in extremely handy in clearing away screen-filling swarms of enemies and simple boss battles.

For better or worse, there isn't much else going on here. Thankfully though, the simple gameplay proves to be remarkably entertaining and surprisingly quite challenging nonetheless; I only wish there was more content to support the fun playing experience. Banging out the story mode can take as little as a couple of hours in one sitting on the easy difficulty, maybe a handful or so hours on hard at most, which needless to say is painfully short. If you have a friend with the game you can play through the story mode again in co-op mode via Ad Hoc wireless play, which is pretty fun, and there is a secondary Survival mode to test your skills with as well, but neither tacks on enough lasting appeal to fully compensate for the limited all-around feature set.

What really stands out about Platypus is its distinctive claymation graphical style that really puts on an artistic show for your eyes to enjoy. The game's environments, ship models and effects are brought to life with a whimsical Play-Doh-like charm, which is the prominent characteristic that spreads through the entire game and makes it completely unique from anything else released on the PSP yet. As far as the audio is concerned, the poppy background tunes and arcadey explosions and weapon sounds fulfil their roles effectively, but aren't exactly memorable in any particular way - good but nothing spectacular.

In the end that's basically how I'd summarize Platypus as a whole; it's a good, solid game that has a tremendous visual appeal and is generally a ton of fun to play, but at the same time does absolutely nothing spectacular that hasn't been seen in any shooter before it and falls short of delivering a long-lasting playing experience that would justify it being a must have addition to your PSP collection. Platypus is without question worth playing, whether you're a rookie or a hardcore gamer, but you're probably better off just renting it and saving your money for something a little more substantial in longevity.

Reviewed by Matt Litten for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).