Battleships Sea On Fire Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Let battle commence.

We've played some battleship games before. And if I remember correctly, some pretty good ones with decent animations and power ups to make the game more interesting. This is not one of those games.

What you have here is the standard battleship game on your phone. And if you've played the game before, there is a distinct lack of strategy involved. Ok, you may be able to narrow things down a bit and work out a rough idea of where the other ships are (based on the fact that you can't place a ship directly adjacent to another - one square of gap must be used), but with a reasonably large playing area it can often feel quite random.

You start of with 10 ships to place of different sizes. One 4 squares long, two 3 squares long, three 2 squares long and four 1 square long. These can be placed horizontally or rotated vertically before placement. Place them around your board. And battle commences.

This may sound patronising but I'm sure there are some yoot (that's youth to you and me) who have never heard of or played the game before. If you get a hit, you get another go. And you get awards if you sink a ship right after one of yours has been sunk, or if you hit two ships in the same go (you seem to get awards ALL the time - where are the stats collated?).

As you play through the 20 levels your naval rank increases. What this does for you I don't know. It's automatic as you progress. And if you don't want to play in campaign mode, there is an instant battle option which won't affect your rank. Graphically you ca choose from one of 3 themes - world war 1, pirates or science fiction. The music and graphics change accordingly. So there is some variety there at least, but the board is a little small and graphics aren't one of the game's strong suits.

To be honest, I'm not sure what is. There's no option to play a friend or put scores online or play via bluetooth. You would think the AI would start off easy and get harder as you progress but this seems to be completely random. It took me a few goes to beat battle 1. Currently on battle 4 but at the end the AI seemed to suspiciously know exactly where my boats were hiding. As a landlubber, I don't care whether they are boats or ships.

And speaking of not caring, the increase in rank didn't hook me at all, as you can't see any graphics or additional features for doing so, just a few words on a screen. Most other battleship games have a fair amount of powerups or tweaks designed to make the original game more interesting and take advantage of the mobile platform. This was a direct port. It's like playing tic-tac-toe. Sometimes it's fun but only before the age of about 5.

I'm not sure what else to say really, there are better battleship games out there, and unless you are a purist who wants only the original version, I would give those a try.