Navy Challenge Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Why sir, I do believe that I sunk your battleship! A mobile version of the classic game.

I think just about everybody knows Battleships. If you don't then very quickly, you arrange some ships on a board that your opponent can't see and you also can't see their board. Then you take it in turns to attack a specific square, if you hit a square that a ship is on you score a hit, and once you have hit all the squares the ship is on, you have sunk it! If you do get that hit then you keep getting another go until you miss.

Ok, now that that's out of the way, let's get onto the game. It's fairly basic but the graphics are nice as the detail on the ships is good. As is the animation of the attacks with a missile falling out of the sky. Plus the flames look pretty decent too, but there's not really a lot to do here as the animation is fairly minimum and the background is also not overly special. The music is good though as there's a very naval tune when you load the game and sound effects in the game. These consist of missiles hitting or missing and there's also a little part of the tune when you sink the ship. So not bad then.

Controls are easy enough, use the D or Key pad to move your ships and the main button to place them. 1 will rotate the ships and in the game, press the main button on the square you want to attack. The shoulder buttons allow you to do special attacks in the advanced mode. Simple stuff.

Playability is not bad. This is mainly due to the fact that Navy Challenge is a classic game so it was always quite addictive in the first place. There are two modes, classic and advanced and in advanced the ships have weapons and functions, some can fire a torpedo across a whole line and others can move or detect boats. Therefore in advanced, it makes a difference which boats are sunk and the game becomes more tactical. There are levels to progress through in both modes although I don't really know what difference the later levels seems to make as the AI still seemed a little random. I'm not sure how you can program an AI to be better with a game that involves random attacking like this. If the AI managed to hit a part of one of your ships, it would find the rest of it and sink it pretty quickly. You can definitely get into the game although it doesn't seem to let you continue from the middle of a level which is a real shame as some of the levels can take a while. It can be quite frustrating when you are trying to hard to find that last ship while the AI seems to know where yours are!

Lastability is not bad as this is a really nice little game to have when you're bored. Ok, a level where you don't manage to find anything quickly can still take around half an hour, but you do get into it in trying to find where the sneaky AI has placed its ships. Also, the game progress can be saved in both modes which is great, but I'm not sure if anything happens when you clock the game. I'm on Level 6 on both but imagine that there's still another 4 levels to go.

Enjoyable adaptation of the classic game but not really much to it.