Battleship® Review. 1st Person Shooter and Naval Strategy That Just Doesn’t Work

Battleship draws from the classic board strategy game that was turned into a movie and finally into a console game. It combines both 1st person shooter and naval strategy elements which might not be the most awkward of mixes, but for a classic, the end result is tragic.

Graphics: 4.0

What the game lacks in gameplay it makes up for in palatable graphics. The landscape design isn’t exciting, but the CGI and FPS are pretty decent. The alien characters look, well, like aliens, and the movement is quite fluid. However, the landscape is uninspired, and occasionally you might run into an invisible barrier that prevents you from moving forward. You also need to stay on a singular path, unless you are straying off to find some collectible.

Gameplay: 4.0

As Lt. Cole Mathis, you are initially tasked with disposing of a batch of explosives out in Hawaii. As you do the runs, an alien object falls into the sea and in an instant, the training exercise that you are engaged in quickly turns into a running battle with aliens invading from the sea. Your role quickly overarches from a 1st person shooter leading your crew to an all-out assault, to a naval strategist directing ships and submarines trapped in the sea.

The first scenes are those of 1st person shooting, and it isn’t immediately clear why it was necessary to combine the two types of genres. However, as you battle out on land, you are tasked with collecting wildcards and fire-ups which should aid your ships to defeat the advancing alien battleships. Although the game is designed to mostly focus on the FPS scenes, which might leave you vulnerable if you don’t occasionally call up your strategy screen.

Controls: 3.5

The controls on Xbox are also decent, nothing to brag about. You need to move quite close to the target if you want to annihilate it. Switching to a different weapon is quite difficult, and it might take you a while by which time your head might be blown to smithereens by some angry alien. That, coupled with a reticle that only focuses on a narrow target after you have fired it for a while, makes the controls one of my least favorite parts of the game.

Replay Value: 3.0

I literally tried to find something about this game that would make it worth replaying and couldn’t find anything. Hawaii’s design is a monstrosity, while the combat scenes are mostly awkward. The levels keep repeating the same storyline, which is to move to different compounds and disable alien radio jammers. There aren’t enough checkpoints in this game if an alien hoard overruns you. You won’t find any alternative modes to keep the gameplay exciting here, and there are only 7 missions in the entire game.

Conclusion

Battleship’s execution is terribly flawed, and you wonder if maybe they should have just called this game something else instead of doing the classic board game injustice. Very few missions coupled with terrible combat scenes take away from any initial excitement you might have when trying out the game first. Maybe in another life, a combination of an FPS and naval strategy game would have yielded better results.