You probably remember the PSP as the "God of War in your pocket" machine. Or maybe the device where you spent way too many hours hunting Rathalos in Monster Hunter. But if you’re looking for Call of Duty on PSP, the history is surprisingly short. There is exactly one official game. Just one.
While the Nintendo DS got several unique (and honestly impressive) ports like Modern Warfare and Black Ops, Sony's handheld only ever received Call of Duty: Roads to Victory.
Released in 2007 by Amaze Entertainment, it’s a weird, fascinating relic of a time when developers were still trying to figure out how to make a first-person shooter work without a second analog stick. It wasn’t perfect. Some critics at the time called it "laughable." But if you go back and play it today, there’s a charm to its jankiness that modern, polished shooters completely lack.
What Was Call of Duty: Roads to Victory Actually Like?
Honestly, if you play it now, the first thing that hits you is the control scheme. Since the PSP only had one nub, you had to use the face buttons (Triangle, Circle, X, and Square) to aim. It felt like trying to write a letter with your non-dominant hand while wearing a mitten.
But once you got used to the "clunky" aiming, the game was surprisingly ambitious.
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The campaign wasn't just a tiny demo. It featured 14 missions spread across three different perspectives: the 82nd Airborne (American), the 1st Canadian Army, and the British Parachute Regiment. You weren't just a lone super-soldier; you were part of massive historical operations like Market Garden and the Battle of the Scheldt.
The Highlights
- The American Campaign: Focused on classic paratrooper drops and chaotic street fighting in Italy and France.
- The Canadian Campaign: This was a rare treat. Most WWII games ignore the Canadians, but here you got to play through the grueling Battle of the Scheldt.
- The British Campaign: Involved heavy-duty airborne operations and the final push into Germany.
The graphics were actually quite good for 2007. The character models had moving mouths—not synced to the dialogue, but hey, they tried—and the environments felt lived-in. You’d see planes buzzing overhead and smoke rising from distant ruins. It felt like a proper "big" Call of Duty game squeezed into a tiny UMD disc.
The Multiplayer Ghost Town
The game featured 6-player ad-hoc multiplayer. No online infrastructure, just local wireless. You needed five friends with PSPs and five copies of the game to get the full experience. In 2026, finding that is basically impossible unless you’re at a very specific retro gaming convention.
It had nine maps and the classic modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag. Because of the hardware limitations, the maps were small, but the intensity was there. It was basically the precursor to what we now see in Call of Duty: Mobile, just without the microtransactions and neon skins.
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Why There Wasn't a "Modern Warfare" on PSP
This is the question that bugs most fans. By 2009, Modern Warfare 2 was the biggest thing on the planet. Why didn't Activision bring Soap and Price to the PSP?
The hardware was the bottleneck. The PSP was powerful for its time, but it couldn't handle the physics and script-heavy set pieces of the Modern Warfare era without looking like a slideshow. Additionally, by the late 2000s, Sony was shifting focus toward the PS Vita, which eventually got Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified.
Speaking of Declassified, if you bought that game on the Vita, it actually came with a digital voucher for Roads to Victory. That’s arguably the best way to play the PSP title today because you can map the face buttons to the Vita’s right analog stick. It turns a "C-tier" shooter into a solid "A-tier" experience.
The Modern Way to Play: Emulation and Beyond
If you’re itching to revisit Call of Duty on PSP today, you aren't stuck digging through eBay for a working UMD drive. The PPSSPP emulator is essentially the gold standard now.
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Running Roads to Victory on a modern phone or PC allows you to crank the resolution up to 4K. It looks shockingly sharp. More importantly, you can "bind" the aiming buttons to a modern controller’s right stick. This fixes the game's biggest flaw instantly.
Quick Tips for Playing in 2026:
- Use the "Vulkan" Backend: If you're on Android or Windows, this helps avoid the weird texture flickering that used to plague the game in older emulator versions.
- Map the Buttons: In the emulator settings, map Triangle/Circle/X/Square to your right analog stick. It makes the game feel like a modern console shooter.
- Check out "Nazi Zombies: Portable": While not an official Activision release, there is a massive homebrew project called Nazi Zombies: Portable built on the Quake engine for PSP. It’s a fan-made port of the classic Zombies mode that runs natively on PSP hardware and is, frankly, better than most official mobile ports.
Is It Worth Revisiting?
Is it the best Call of Duty? No. Not even close. But Roads to Victory represents a specific era of gaming where developers were trying to do the impossible. It’s a historical curiosity that actually holds up better than people give it credit for, especially if you have a way to fix the controls.
If you’re a series completionist or just a fan of WWII history, it's worth the two or three hours it takes to blast through a campaign. It’s a reminder that before we had Warzone in our pockets, we had a single analog stick and a dream.
Next Steps for You:
If you want to experience this yourself, download the PPSSPP emulator and find a legitimate way to rip your UMD. Once installed, head into the Control Mapping menu first. Don't even try to play with the default face-button aiming; save your thumbs the agony and map those controls to a real controller right away. Once you do that, the Canadian campaign missions are genuinely some of the most underrated levels in the entire WWII era of the franchise.