Bang without Boom

Does anyone remember the PlayStation Portable (PSP)? I'm sure you do. After all, it was Sony's first venture into the handheld market in 2004 and made serious gaming on the go possible. After all, only Nintendo products such as the GameBoy or the Nintendo DS, released in the same year, were on the market. Gaming on your cell phone? Sure, if you had too much money and wanted to afford one of these 'smartphones' to play some Snake knock-off.

In 2012, the PlayStation Vita was released as the successor to the PSP with a few exclusive titles - 79 to be precise. According to this statistic Unit 13 from American developer studio Zipper Interactive was among the top 10 in terms of sales. The developers, who were otherwise responsible for games such as MechWarrior 3 (1999) or the SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs-series (2002-2011), delivered a third-person shooter whose gameplay was already considered outdated at the time: duck for cover, shoot from cover, repeat. It was to be Zipper Interactive's last game, as Sony closed them down to reallocate resources.

Despite its success, this is a fairly unknown game, but I wanted to listen to its soundtrack anyway. It quickly turns out that it is much like the actual game: short and predictable. Composer Justin Burnett, who also wrote for the SOCOM-series, tends to be more involved in the film and television business and shows in the seven tracks of the OST that he is good at action, but not the kind that sticks in the memory for time.

If I were to break it down - which I don't really have to because of the scope of the score, but I do anyway because of its uniformity - the music could be reduced to the following key points: Call of Duty-like, dramatic interplay of electric guitar riffs and strings that martially capture the military setting and underscore the action in a motivational way. The whole thing sounds like an action-packed trailer, but ultimately lacks an overarching theme. If we look at the music in Battlefield 3, for example, which was released a year before Unit 13 , or even Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, we can see how cheerful patriotism can be more catchy.