Battleship

If you can live with the technical flaws, the boring AI and the lack of ambition, there's enough sci-fi shooting with a hint of strategy here to keep genre fans entertained for a few hours.

A shooter that's about as "meh" as you can get. [Issue#86, p.87]

A title that isn't truly good or bad, with aspects that can be fun at times yet which grow boring over the course of its 4 hour lifespan, and ultimately it falls just short of being anything more than decidedly average.

Battleship the Video Game is just as forgettable as the movie. It's lacking any sort of replay value, outside of hunting down little Battleship pegs or playing through on a harder difficulty – but why punish yourself? The graphics fail to deliver, as does the audio and the set-up.

Stagnant and lacking in substance, Battleship is a bit of a floater. [June 2012, p.105]

3.5 hours of FPS/ Strategy hybrid gameplay that is truly awful. Keep away.

The core of Battleship is fun and entertaining, and it makes you think that if Double Helix had a full-dev cycle, they could have put together a very memorable experience. As is though, Battleship feels half-finished and rushed out the door without any of the polish we've come to expect from a game with a $60 price tag.

Poor value is the real deal-breaker, though. Because Battleship weighs in at just seven single-player missions and zero multiplayer (seriously???), it's only a few hours of mindless fun, and you can easily beat it in a long afternoon. For $60, we deserve a game that sinks battleships, not wallets.

Take your hard earned money and spend it on something else. Or grab a pen and paper to play some actual old school Battleship.

Battleship is one part generic and one part simplistic. The link that binds the two parts together is exasperatingly cumbersome, and that's probably the biggest problem with the game. It starts out fun, but quickly gets repetitive: The same old story.

Battleship is just another below-par movie license videogame. It features an extremely short campaign that you can blast through in an evening and no multiplayer or incentives to replay once you've finished the game. It isn't worth the full retail asking price for the sheer fact that none of the gameplay is exciting or good. In short, the game is basic, boring, uninspiring and not entertaining. Battleship should be left to sink in the cluttered first-person shooter market.

It doesn't really work, as the game never finds the right way to balance the two modes of play, but this brief flicker of ambition offers just enough ballast to prevent this otherwise tiresomely unremarkable game from sinking completely.

By no means the worst movie-based video game we've ever played, Battleship: The Game has some nice ideas, but fails to follow through on the concept. The marriage of real-time strategy and first-person action should elevate the title beyond the dreaded movie tie-in, but ends up feeling massively underdeveloped. One for the weekend perhaps, but Battleship: The Game's redeeming qualities are lost among a sea of mediocrity.

Although it is not as bad as I initially feared and despite showing some interesting concepts, Battleship still is rubbish.

Bland presentation and sloppy mechanics sink Battleship more effectively than a torpedo ever could.

There are only seven missions in the campaign, and you revisit three of them, so variety is shot. Amazingly, that is it. There is no forced multiplayer thrown in, or even a split screen option for a lame co-op endeavor. You get these seven missions, none of which are very fun, and this is still sitting at $60. I cannot imagine who this appeals to.

Battleship hardly shows value of any kind, except maybe for the board game like tactical sessions, which would have cut a better figure as a Live Arcade game rather than being diluted in a dull retail game.

Extremely unsuccessful attempt to create a cool shooter can possibly attract gamers only for its easily obtainable achievements. [June 2012]

This is a broken, dismal game that manages only to disappoint across its meager four hours. Fans looking for a longer experience can ramp up the difficulty level, but this just means you'll be bored AND frustrated. If you want an authentic Battleship experience, go buy the board game and avoid this dreck.

Battleship is little more than a checkmark on a to-do list; a completed contractual obligation. Just a handful of red pegs on a board, signifying a failed effort.

Battleship shouldn't be played by anyone. The game is just incomplete and has many issues.

Nobody can have been expecting much from a film tie-in like this but Battleship's first person action still manages to sink well below the bottom of the barrel.

The story is very lacklustre and plays out very poorly, like the movie. The gameplay is great if you're judging it against a game from the previous generation. The lack of multiplayer is an unforeseen positive and it's generally a game I never want to play again. My top tip, avoid and stick to the old school Battleships game. It's far superior.