If you’re a child of the 80’s or 90’s, then the phrase “you sunk my battleship!” will have a certain amount of nostalgia for you. It was one of those board games, up there with Guess Who, that was just fun to play and wasn’t overly complicated with rules. You placed your ships down, so did your enemy and then you took it in turns to take shots at each other each time advising as to whether it was a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’.
With the exception of the movie tie-in Battleship (both of which I refuse to accept exist) the original game has cropped up every now and again and it’s Frima Studio who brings Battleship to the XBox One. Nostalgia will undoubtedly wash all over you when you start up a ‘Classic’ game as it’s exactly what you’d expect. You start by placing your fleet after which you then start taking turns to find and destroy your enemy’s ships. Whilst this a rather good look rendition of the classic game, this simplistic game, isn’t so great for a modern computer game as it gets rather boring.
It ends up in this situation for two main reasons. Firstly, with every shot, comes an animation of one of your ships firing its weapon and then another of whether that shot hit or missed. Following this you then have to sit and watch your enemies move which also includes these animations. In single player this eventually gets rather monotonous as you cannot skip their turn. This can make games run for up to half an hour or longer which when all you’re doing is picking a square, hitting fire and then waiting isn’t all that thrilling.
Battleship does have another game mode, Clash at Sea, which adds resources to every turn. This brings in an extra strategic element to the game as you can now take more than one shot and even take shots that just let you know if anything is there. In this game mode each ship has two abilities one offensive, the other for discovery. You then have to decide, each turn, whether you spend all your resources that turn or save to use some of your ships more advanced abilities such as the aircraft carrier’s 12 square air-strike or the submarines sonar pulse. Clever use of each ships abilities can make games move quicker and make the game a little more cerebral however it still suffers from slow turn rate from the game’s AI and the rather monotonous feel to each match.
Speaking of the AI I’m not sure whether it was intentionally comical or not but it’s laughable. Many times I saw the AI happily discover where all my ships were, even to the point they were two hits from victory, only to watch it take shots at empty squares allowing me to come back and win. If it’s part of an effort to scale the difficulty, then it’s broken as it never really got any better. It breaks any amount of suspense which is already suffering from the soundtrack which is a rather kind descriptor as it’s a one track pony on repeat.
You’d think, then, that multiplayer would be the games’ saving grace and it is there. However, at time of writing, this reviewer was unable to find a match despite trying for well over an hour on more than one occasion to find a match. This is likely due to a small player base but unless you have a willing friend or partner who would be up for a local 1v1 then it’s pot-luck as to whether you’ll find a game online. Whilst the lack of online numbers isn’t surprising it really does highlight the single player’s shortcomings in terms of its excitement or lack thereof. What’s even more worrying is that without an concerted effort on the part of either the existing community (assuming there is one) or the publisher it’s hard to envisage this player base increasing to a point where you can fire up the game and expect there to be someone online and waiting for your challenge.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Battleship though as all things being equal it does exactly what it says on the tin. It doesn’t over complicate things and the Clash at Sea twist adds a rather fun dynamic to the original formula. The tutorial helps newcomers to the game and the resource management side of Clash at Sea and it isn’t too long. It then feeds nicely in to the single player whose 30 mission campaign tries its best to liven things up by adding twists to a round every so often. These twists range from being ambushed and leaving you with two fewer ships to having to manage with less resources per turn than your opponent. Whilst these twists don’t quite have enough legs to overcome the games overarching problems with Player vs AI matches they are admirable attempts which at least make you pause for thought.
So this really does present us with a quandary. On the one hand Battleship is a game that is exactly as you’d expect it to be. It’s represented nicely with colourful graphics, neatly laid out and navigated via a tight and easy to follow controller layout. The addition of Clash at Sea introduces a fun and interesting dynamic when compared to the ‘Classic’ game mode. However, it cannot be understated how boring a match can get when the only opponent you can get a game against is the local AI. With the player base still relatively small and there being no guarantee it’ll increase to a point of critical mass it’s hard to recommend a game such as this. Still if you have a hankering for screaming out “you’ve sank my battleship” in an attempt to rekindle your youth without having to fumble in the attic then Battleship will suit you to a ‘T’. Otherwise you may find yourself disappointed with a game so faithful to its original forebear you may as well pick up the physical game and play that instead.
