War of the Worlds Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

The game of the hit film, a nicely put together shoot em up.

I saw War of the Worlds last week and was impressed Spielberg was back to his Jaws shocking best. This is the game of the film, but instead of playing as Tom Cruise you get to play as an alien tripod intent on destroying humanity! Cool!

The graphics are very slick from the opening titles to the newscasters and the actual tripod itself. For such a small screen device, the developers have created a lot of detail right down to the free flowing tentacles at the bottom. The backgrounds are of the same quality (although not animated) and the planes, helicopters and even tiny little people running on the street below all look good. The movement of the game is nicely done as well and the expolosions and your own shots have sufficient speed to be considered as a real shoot em up. In fact whenever I played this on the train people were always peeking over my shoulder as the graphics are so eye-catching.

The sound is reasonable, there is a tune when you load the game and also some shooting effects during play. Not a whole lot, but then this isn't R-Type.

Controls are simple to pick up. The D or key pad can be used and the tripod moves left or right on the screen. The main button or 5 will fire your weapons and this firing can be moved up or down using the directions. 1 or 3 will explode a lightning bomb (or smart bomb) killing everything on the screen and 7 or 9 will operate your tentacles to pick up either people running or bombs which you can throw. You get used to the controls really quickly and they're not a problem at all.

The playability is good as the game is a better than average shooter. The fact that you play as one of the aliens is different enough and there are three difficulty levels. Each level has a boss at the end and in between you get news reports detailing what devastation is going on. At the end of each level there is a score based on numerous things and you will get a rating as well to put on the high score board. Massive destruction is the rating I got most and it was fun to see how much destruction I could manage. There are also chain hits you can do as when a squadron flies in, one ship will have a target on it and if you manage to hit that ship then the whole squadron explodes! Cool! Also you can pick up and throw bombs and are able to shoot incoming bullets and missiles so if you like shoot em ups there's plenty in this for you. I almost forgot to mention that there are power ups as well, these will build up your shooting power bar at the bottom making your shots stronger and wider (additional streams). When you die this obviously starts at zero. The power ups automatically float towards you and you collect them unless you're getting hit at the time. Getting hit does jar your ability to fire so you can find yourself in situations where the enemy fire is tricky to avoid.

The lastability is good for shooting games as it's a lot of fun to play and has 3 difficulty levels. The number of continues can be defined as well so there is a finite limit to the game. This makes it challenging, even on easy. I never spent long enough to complete it on easy (so many games, so little time) and it did get pretty hard in the latter levels. Still, it was fun enough to play again and if you like shoot em ups you should check this one out!