Battleship
Developer: Double Helix
Publisher: Activision
Platform: Xbox360, Playstation 3, Wii
Genre: First person shooter/Turn Based strategy
Rating: Teen
Release Date: May 15, 2012
Hey Kids, it’s summertime, and you know what that means. VIDEO GAMES BASED ON MOVIES! No doubt as some of you know, video game based on movies are pretty bad as it seems that they try to make a game in a short time frame and release it near or at the same time as the movie. Someone has to do it, and as the newest reviewer for 8bitfix, I get the pleasure of playing them all! (God help me).
Battleship…
…
Very loosely based off the board game of the same name, Battleship looks to try and do what its Hasbro counterpart has accomplished (Transformers) and see for making a name for itself in the video game world. Does this game offer anything special, or does it sink on its maiden voyage?
…
You might already know the answer to that, but for the sake of argument, let’s find out anyway.
Presentation
In Battleship the game, you are Elite Demolitions Specialist Cole Mathis, who is in Hawaii with the rest of his squad disabling explosives when the Aliens invade. Because they have set up this force field all around Hawaii, their aircraft can’t take off and they have no means to escape or call for help, so it is up to you and the Navy to fight off the aliens and save the world from invasion. While that sounds like a good introduction, there isn’t much else being added in the story. Literally nothing else gets added on as to why the aliens are there or anything to help tell the story further, so let’s move on.
Graphics
Graphics in battleship are really cheap to look at. The landscape looks bland, the ships from the humans and aliens aren’t exactly anything special to look at and the water doesn’t look all too spectacular either. For a game that seems to focus on “Battleships” it really didn’t look like they tried to make the water look authentic at all. Also I hope you like fighting on cliffs as you can always see the ocean in the distance, as there is no variety in the stages at all and how the only difference in the scenery is when it is night time. Meanwhile the characters you see on screen are pretty much the exactly same; The humans all have their faces covered so you could say they all look the exact same, while the aliens wear blue, grey or yellow colored armor, but that’s about it. I suppose as long as you give the three bad guys three different forms of attacks, that’s good enough right?
Sound/Music
Sound and music… They are as generic as they come here. The dialog tries to be witty with soldiers trying to sound all macho, but they aren’t. The voices again are as generic as they come, and if it wasn’t for the radio objective giver, I would honestly think that they had one guy doing the voice of every soldier in the game. The guns sound effects sound very cheap, and the music honestly sounds like it was ripped out of a “Pirates of the Caribbean” game. At least the explosions sound good later in the game actually sound like explosions, but that seems to be the only thing they got right.
Gameplay
So how does Battleship fair in regards of Gameplay? Well, there are two parts to Battleship: The FPS and the RTS. The RTS portion of the game happens when you click the left bumper (or L1) as it takes you to a map of the island you are fighting on. From there you can see where your ships are placed and where the enemy ships are. As much as you would like to ignore this, you honestly can’t as missions are tied in to where your ships are positioned and can affect the tide of battle. For example: there are parts of the grid map that can either let you call in support fire to help you clear the way or take out enemies, or can be used by the enemy to blow you up. While this sounds important, you are really just playing this mode because you have to, otherwise you fail if your ships go down. As you take down enemies in the FPS, you can collect cards which allows you to power up/repair/control your ships in the RTS mode. Also if you think that controlling ships in battle is fun, it isn’t. When you engage with another ship, you have 20 seconds to sink the ship; there are no other ships around to get in the way (even if you are surrounded by five others), and in the fight, you don’t have to worry about getting sunk as this is basically god mode for you. Even the guns aren’t anything special as you just point the cursor at the ship and button mash until time is up or you take down the shop.
As for the FPS part of the game, there are only five guns in the game: Pistol, Rifle, Shotgun, alien minigun, and alien sniper. While ammo is pretty scarce in the game outside of a few ammo boxes here and there, you will find yourself running up to an alien and taking his weapon with full ammo more times than naught. As for the enemies you fight, they are pushovers, even on the highest difficult on the game, they can go down fairly easy while you have your way with them. I’m usually not one for FPS games, but this honestly felt like I was playing Normal difficult on Call of Duty. However, when you get into the 2nd half of the game (about an hour or two in), it turns from being a cakewalk, to incredibly aggravating as you get introduced to snipers and thugs, and you realize that dumping a full clip into a thug doesn’t drop them, while snipers can pretty much kill you in a hit, even if you are shooting them. What makes this worse is that the checkpoints are few and far apart, and it getting aggravating having to go back and do about 5-15 minutes worth of work all over again because you got cheap shot and then having to go back to the RTS part and having to do the orders all over again and reequip everyone. Other than that, you are basically playing a very cheap shooter game that doesn’t hold a candle to most FPS from years ago.
As you can see, I was able to take my time with one Thug Alien after he seemed to lose complete interest in me and attack an ally. My first fight with the Thug, and this was the best it was able to do against me...
Lasting Appeal
What Lasting Appeal? You can beat the game on the highest difficulty with little to no complications, and the only thing that would make you want to play it again is to get the achievements for sinking ships or collecting Pegs. However, even Achievement hunters will probably struggle to finish the game, unless if they have the incredible patience to sink ships. Also, it should come as no surprise that this does not have a multiplayer, but let’s face it, if there was, you probably wouldn’t see people using it.
Conclusion
How is this $60?! This game tries to be like another Call of Duty game, only to fail miserably. The game’s so called highest difficulty can be a cakewalk, while at the same time can be incredibly cheap with a very unfair checkpoint system; at least Call of Duty realizes that when you take down ten guys and advance it leaves another checkpoint, but here, you have to be flawless for 20 minutes or be forced to do it all over again. It honestly felt like playing Call of Duty 2, but much worse than that.
Now again, granted these video games based on movies usually have a short production time put on their game together, but to try and sell it for $60 is downright insulting to the people you are trying to sell it to, especially if you can get much better games at the same price (or even 3 other shooter games at $20 a pop). The only good thing that can be said about this game is this: If you do plan on playing it, just know you don’t have to suffer for long since it is a very short game. Unless you are a glutton for punishment (like me), I would say to treat this game like the movie it was based on and avoid it at all costs.
Score: 2/10
Review Scale