You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in their 20s or older who hasn’t uttered the phrase, “You sank my battleship!” at least once before, possibly with an expletive or two attached. Now, the storied war game Battleship has made its way to the iPhone as an iPhone app game ($2.99), and aside from a few irritating technical snafus, it’s almost everything you could hope for.
First, the good: This is Battleship. The iPhone app features three modes and three ways to play each of them. The classic version of the game is here, of course. There, you’ll place your ships and take turns trying to blow up all of your enemy’s ships one shot at a time.
Or, if you want more firepower options, you can try the “Superweapons” mode, where you can choose three weapons from a much longer list (though only four are unlocked to start) and try to vanquish your foe in similar fashion to the classic game. Each weapon fires in a different way, and some of the weapons even act as defense shields. If nothing else, Superweapons adds a bit more strategy to the average game.
Finally, if you’re in a rush, you can try the “Salvo” mode. Salvo is a classic Battleship game, but you get to fire as many shots as you have ships. So when you start out with 5 ships, you’ll get to place five different shots on the board to try and stamp out the enemy. Lose a ship and you’ll have four shots per turn, and so on. The games go by much faster because you’re shooting off multiple missiles at a time.
While you can play each of these three modes either against the computer, against a human opponent (passing your phone back and forth), or via online multi-player, the online multi-player leaves a lot to be desired. Constant crashing mars the experience, making it nearly impossible to finish a game, especially with no auto-save feature anywhere. Even playing against another live person becomes cumbersome if someone accidentally exits to the home screen. Again, because of the lack of auto-save, you’re left to start all over.
The single-player option is a lot of fun, though, and the game spices up the theatrics by showing animations depicting whether your missiles hit their targets or not. If they did, you get another animation showing a close-up of the hit. These can be turned off or sped through, but they add a bit more action to the proceedings.
It’s unfortunate that the game’s multi-player functions are so clunky and that there isn’t some way to save your progress mid-game, but for $2.99, anyone who enjoyed playing Battleship growing up would still be advised to check this out. If you’re on the fence, it might be worth the wait to see if Electronic Arts can come up with some fixes to make this a five-star iPhone app.
