Summer brings with it many events - higher gas prices, bees, and movie tie-in games. To start off this year we have Battleship (May 15, 2012), which is based off of the recently released movie that's based off of the board game that's been around for over 50 years.
Published by Activison and developed by Double Helix, Battleship puts you in command of Officer Cole Mathis. While Cole is running around a Hawaii island disarming bombs for some reason, aliens decide to invade Earth and Cole is tasked with saving it.
Going into battle
Gameplay is "heavily inspired" by Halo and I use those words mockingly. It's basically Halo, but with the polish, balance and fun removed. Hilariously, the very first words you hear upon booting up the game are "Hey, Master Chief!" Now, of course you may be wondering if this plays anything like the board game and the answer is yes! Well, sort of. Battleship is mostly a FPS with some RTS elements. You can go into Battle Command Mode that conspicuously takes 10-15 seconds to load and open your 2D map. This is where your battleships are located and where you can place them to fend off alien attack ships. It's not much fun and you have to do this multiple times a level. You can acquire power up’s called Wildcards by taking down enemies in FPS mode and use them to increase your ship's defenses or upgrade missiles and armor. One card allows you to command a ship for up to 20 seconds whereupon you can fire away using the trigger and shoulder buttons.
Manning the torpedoes
When you're not doing that, you're running around from point to point gunning down aliens while setting charges to defense towers so your ships can attack, or something, I think. It's never really made clear why you need to disable towers so your battleships can actually battle, but that's your objective for every level. The game never finds a correct way to balance these two modes and you're stuck in this repetitive grind until the end.
Sinkin' Battleships
Weapons are run of the mill. You have an assault rifle with recoil out the wazoo - it is basically useless - a pistol that's serviceable and a shotgun that's not terrible. Enemies come in three's - alien soldiers, snipers and brutes. Soldiers can be taken down quickly with a headshot. Snipers have perfect aim and can be very annoying to eliminate since they'll continuously fire at you at all times. Brutes can be dispatched with little effort by a shotgun blast; if you forgot to pick up a shotgun, they'll obliterate you easily. That's about all the strategy found in the game.
Parting Thoughts
Battleship feels largely unfinished and rushed out the door. For a game with a $60 tag, it has no multiplayer of any kind only a single player campaign that is not just incredibly redundant, but can be completed in 4 hours or less depending on the difficulty setting. I cannot recommend this at all, while the game isn’t a broken mess there are no redeemable qualities about it that warrant even a rental. It’s unfortunately another run of the mill movie tie-in game that fails to break the mold.
About the Author
Shawn "Dogmatic" Vales is a lover of both Music and Games. He currently resides in Maryland, plotting for world domination and rooting for the Redskins. His favorite type of games tend to be Adventure, First Person Shooters, Music Simulation, RPG's and Survival Horror. When not playing games, he's building up his music collection and Tweeting relentlessly.
