Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law PSP Review
This weekend I grabbed a copy of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for the PSP with the hopes that it would fill the void left behind after the last Ace Attorney game. Harvey Birdman succeeds in this, offering near-identical game mechanics but with an Adult Swim setting.
The game stays faithful to the show, recreating it’s Flash-like animation, oddball humor, and cast of obscure Hanna Barbara characters. The entire voice acting cast was involved, with exception of Stephen Colbert (it’s not like he’s busy working on anything else). However, they did snare Louis Black to voice one of the villains.
If there’s one thing I can say about this game that’s disappointing, it’s that it’s short. I offer no exaggeration when I say that if you started the game on a fully-charged battery, you could finish it before the power light turned red. I understand that there’s a lot of expensive work involved since you’re essentially making interactive episodes of the cartoon and that the UMD disc only has so much room for all those audio files, but if you’re going to list this game in the same price range as any other new release, I’m going to ask for more than just a few hours of gameplay.
The game does try to offer replay value in the form of unlockable content. There are many instances in the game where you’re asked a multiple choice question. You’re free to choose any of the two incorrect ones without penalty for a quick laugh, but only choosing the correct answer will progress the scene. One of these instances will have an incorrect answer that triggers a bit involving a cameo from a Street Fighter character. Find those and you unlock a video clip that you can access from the main screen.
Similarly, you can earn lost points of your health meter if you answer specific questions while holding items that may otherwise appear to be useless. Unfortunately, you won’t really know what those items are until the end of the episode and also have to remember what items you never used.
A bonus feature that I wish they’d included is the ability to watch all of the animated segments tied together as if it were an actual Harvey Birdman episode. That way, we may not be left with much replay value, but at least we’d have something that would be worth watching a few times after solving all the cases.
I bought my copy of the game for $9.99 and I wouldn’t recommend paying any more than that. If they released it on the PlayStation Store for $5.99, I’d call it an even better deal. It was fun and gave me some good laughs, but it was just too short.
