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Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens Review

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All right, it’s Star Wars time! This film got a lot of hype as to be expected since this was a sequel that people had been waiting for. It smashed the box office and looks to easily reach the billion mark while still having enough steam to get a few extra hundred million. I’m in the camp that still doesn’t see it challenging Titanic or Avatar, but it will go far. After seeing the film, I can safely confirm that it is a solid movie. It’s not great, but it’s pretty good and that’s good enough for now.

The film’s plot is a little hard to describe in part because it doesn’t have much of a plot at times. This is actually a bit of a negative for me, but that’ll be mentioned later. The Sith may be gone and the Empire is gone, but the First Order has arrived so the resistance is still the resistance and nothing has really changed for them. At this rate, they’ll never be able to cease control of the universe or become the big heroes that they’ve always wanted to be. Times are tough and it’s a losing battle as all of the Jedi have been destroyed with Luke Skywalker being the final one. The villains are looking for him, but nobody knows where he is.

Meanwhile, Rey is a lady who lives on a desert planet and she comes across a robot who has a map, which leads to Luke Skywalker. Finn also landed on the planet after barely escaping from the First Order and he pretends to be a part of the Resistance to impress Rey. The two of them must now make it to the Resistance to give them the coordinates and if they want to live to tell the tale, they’ll need some help from Han Solo. The First Order is serious business so the heroes have to watch their step.

Rey’s a decent main character. She knows how to fight and decides to help BB-8 get to Luke. She’s fairly selfless and does well to survive in such a harsh environment on her own. To an extent she’s fairly generic, but that helps to fuel the similarities between her and Luke. I’d prefer for her to be a little more headstrong, but maybe that trait will come with practice and overconfidence. That would definitely make her a great heroine! She puts up a good fight in the final showdown although I felt like the fight scene was a little bizarre.

As mentioned, she is already an experienced combatant and in particular, she’s good with a weapon. This training seems to leave her in the final fight or maybe it was just a problem with the choreography. For some reason, she constantly throws out thrusts (A stabbing motion with the Lightsaber) which leaves her vulnerable many times, but Kylo is so weak that it doesn’t end up mattering all that much. The fight was still odd though because Rey seemed experienced enough in the intro to have fought a little better than what she displayed there.

Rey is much better than her male counterpart, Finn. For starters, I didn’t like how Finn was constantly out of breath for most of his earlier scenes. I get that he was a little nervous, but cmon now. It’s not the greatest way to make the main character seem cool. He panicked a lot and the possible romance between him and Rey is already off to a terrible start. This is why we have the friend zone, so random romances won’t occur. I give the film props for avoiding this right away though and it’s possible that this will lead nowhere, which would be great.

Still, I just didn’t find Finn to be a cool character. It doesn’t help that he got wrecked in his first big fight scene. It’s good that he realized what it means to be a hero, but realizing that a little sooner and helping the civilians out on the planet in the intro would have been nice. Better yet, he could have decided not to abandon everyone because he was scared. This character has a ways to go to be even slightly likable.

That being said, Finn’s much better than Kylo. Kylo is a terrible villain and I love how Wikipedia hyped him up a lot. They say that he’s already shown to be as strong as Darth Vader and in interviews they were saying that he’s not totally evil and believes himself to be morally justified in his actions. Either a large part of the film never made it past the director’s cut or it was just false hype. He basically defines the term “Generic villain” and the worst part is that he’s an emotional villain. Kylo is just plain sad and the instant that his mask comes off, the character became a joke.

Did you think that the Jupiter Ascending main villain was bad? This guy’s just like that. He gets emotional constantly and is always panicking. He is always on the verge of tears or losing his revolve so he has to talk to a broken mask and an old man to steady himself. Unlike Vader, he allows his underlings to sass him, but since he’s constantly getting humiliated, I suppose that it’s tough to think of a counter. When a guy who’s never even used a lightsaber before it able to hold his own against the main villain, there’s something wrong. Even when Rey is wrecking Kylo, you have to wonder why anybody fears him. His Force abilities are clearly not very good and he forgets to use them when in the heat of battle. He gets overwhelmed a lot and I can’t say that I will be glad to see him in the sequel. This is a villain who is not necessary and I’d probably take any other Sith from the Star Wars series are a better villain. There are probably ones out there who are even worse in terms of character, but I’m sure that they’d at least be tough. The old man isn’t very interesting either so I’m going to be ready for some new villains to spice things up. I want the Sith to return.

So far, they’re definitely not hinting towards any of the old villains showing up, but that’s okay. The video games and comics will likely deal with the what if scenarios more. The old guard doesn’t necessarily need to show up and upstage the new guys, but I definitely wouldn’t mind since they have earned a spot on the hype train. One old character that I was glad got a small role was C3PO and R2-D2. C3PO’s all right and beats the other robots since he can at least talk in English (Talking in gibberish with a character translating is always annoying) but he’s still not the most interesting character out there. I’m waiting for him to grow an arm cannon and start firing, now that would be epic!

The visuals are pretty fun and I’m always up for a nice aerial fight in space. The characters have their blasters ready and the Lightsaber battles are also good. They are noticeably better than the older films although III had the best fights from the series. Once we get more Jedi and Sith, that should probably change as this is more of a prelude than anything else. Having more action scenes would have definitely been good since the film is actually pretty light in that category. More exploration and dialogue than anything else, but building up the universe is important. I’m assuming that the sequel will be upping the stakes. I can’t say that the soundtrack was too memorable, but I’m almost positive that there was an opera styled song in there somewhere. Films rarely have very memorable soundtracks so it’s not a big deal. We had the classic intro theme, which was certainly fun to hear.

For better or worse, this film was really aimed at creating as much nostalgia as possible. Similar to Avengers Assemble (Cartoon) the film tries to reenact as many scenes as possible from the original film. I dare say that most of this film is filled with references to the older ones. We have the classic Darth Vader vs Luke fight scene, dashing across the desert, and dozens of other such moments. This is fine for the most part and it’s nice to remember the old scenes, but it also left little time for character development, fights, and new plots to move forward. Even the climax is extremely similar to a classic occurrence, but it’s not quite as epic as the original, but that can be said for just about every scene. It tries very hard to be Episode IV, but it just doesn’t work.

A complaint that I had with the film is that it actually dragged on a little towards the middle. I’m not going to call the film boring, but there were parts of it were you would just be waiting for something to happen. It’s just not the most fast paced film out there and I feel like the film could have just been a lot more exciting. The characters limited it, but even with that, a few more space fights or some cool dialogue about Siths and Jedi could have helped. In part, I blame this on the fact that Luke is the only Jedi now. I think this was a pretty poor decision to have made because I don’t want the status quo to have reverted all the way back to IV. It just makes it all the easier to add in more homages and remake scenes from the original.

It was nice to see Han Solo again after so long. He did a good job during the fight scenes and showed that he’s still more adept at it than Chewy. Chewy meant well, but for some reason he wasn’t firing his shots all that accurately so he was mostly a liability this time. Ah well, he can still roar and Han is fine with firing the shots himself. Unlike Luke, Han is a character who continues to look good and does his older self justice. Unfortunately, I can tell that Luke’s going to be a very dicey character. He’ll probably snap out of this soon, but let’s just say that his personality had a big change due to a tragic event. As a result, he’s going to be the generic old guy who whispers words of doom constantly. He basically left the universe to fend for itself, which is very irresponsible and is just sad. I was never the biggest fan of Luke, but this is a new low for the Jedi.

As you can see, I certainly had my share of complaints during the film and it was enough for me to know instantly that it was going to only go as high as a 7. A 7’s pretty good, but it does seem low for Star Wars. That being said, it was still a good film and one of the better ones this year. It’s a fun sci-fi film and while you probably couldn’t call it an epic as much as the original, it still has its stakes. Several planets are blown up in the film and the new weapon is pretty intense, I even created a level in Mario Maker based on the concept.

Ranking the Star Wars films from best to worst, Episode IV is still my favorite. That one’s simply classic at this point and did a great job of starting the franchise off on a high note. Next would be Episode III, Episode VII, then Episode VI, Episode V, Episode I, and finally Episode II. The Force Awakens is pretty high in the list so it’ll be cool to see where the sequel stands. It’s too bad that the main villain will likely return, but aside from that I can easily see the sequel being a solid improvement. We’ll likely have more fight scenes and that’s always exciting.

A good thing that Star Wars has, which has stood the test of time is that the film’s tone/atmosphere is good. It’s pleasant and is part of why the film is easy to just watch and enjoy. I’d compare it to the MCU (Iron Man, Avengers) films in that regard. It goes less for comedy although still has some of it within, but it’s not always foggy outside or the heroes are always panicking. It’s not super grimy and since this is the future, I think everything should look pretty modern. It’s why I was thrilled when Rey got off the desert planet since that wasn’t the best locale.

Overall, I enjoyed The Force Awakens. Now Star Wars can be around for the next generation and once the trilogy is over, we can fully compare it to the original two. I’m fairly confident that this trilogy will end up winning as a trio of 7s is actually fairly likely. This film was what Battle of Gods was for DBZ. It tried to bring back the old audience while getting new viewers in. With that over, I expect everything to get more intense in the sequel and I’m ready for some epic Force abilities from both the Light and the Dark side. We’ve also got the spinoffs and prequels coming up so Star Wars is here to stay at last. Hopefully it has long legs in the box office and continues to rack up the cash so we can also get some new video games!

Overall 7/10

Lego Marvel Super Heroes: Avengers Reassembled Review

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I always try to grab a poster or a picture that has the title in some form, but that wasn’t really possible this time. (*Possible = Quick Google Search) The image that I did grab was still pretty neat though. The Lego craze continues and it’s a fad that I much prefer to the stop motion from back in the day so I’m cool with it. Lego films don’t have the highest amount of replay value out there and they tend to reuse jokes after a while, but they’re always fun the first time around and this one was handled well. Lego’s leave little room for hype moments, but that’s not the point of Legos anyway. This ended up being a solid Lego adventure and one of Marvel’s better ones. (Wait a sec, how many Marvel Lego adventures are there anyway?….)

The Avengers were getting ready for a nice party when Iron Man’s suit is hacked by Ultron! Locked into his suit, Tony can only watch as Ultron tries to humiliate the Avengers by messing up their party. The Avengers will have to think quickly if they want to win this round. Ultron’s army of droids are not going to be easy to defeat and the Avengers are forced to call in a little help to deal with the menace. The Avengers roster has been strengthened with the addition of Vision, but the twins are nowhere to be found. Perhaps for the next special although Scarlet Witch may be the only one to join due to Quicksilver’s ending.

I have to say that Captain America definitely stole the show here. He made a lot of good puns about Ant Man throughout the film. The other characters would always grimace and wince, but that just made it all the better when Captain America would continue. He was unfazed by the reactions of his partners and rightfully so. When others doubt your puns, that doesn’t mean that they are bad. I thought that they were quite clever and he was easily the best character in the entire film. He did a good job during the fights as well.

This short is a comedy first and foremost of course even though there are some quick action scenes. The fights are enjoyable and there are a lot of homages to the actual film. This was to be expected of course and it’s always interesting to see how closely the Legos can emulate the style of the original film. Hawkeye’s costume is barely trying to emulate the film style though as it really stands out with all of the red coloring. It’s hard to totally see what the film was going for, but I actually did like the style though.

We even get some guest stars to show that this is in the same continuity as the Ultimate Spider Man show. Spiderman and Iron Spider arrive to turn the tides and let the heroes know what is going on. They’re left behind so the role is definitely a very small one, but it’s always nice to have a cameo from our favorite wall crawling superhero! There’s not a whole lot more to say about the characters. They’re all in character and slightly more comedycized (New word now folks!) like in Teen Titans Go, but not over the top to the point where the characters would not be likable.

I’m definitely ready for a DC vs Marvel Lego adventure at this point. The possibilities would be endless and I could finally have Batman and Superman defeat their Marvel counterparts. I could almost see Iron Man being the one to fight Batman since the MCU has made him really popular, but either way, DC should take the fight. They’ve always been portrayed as the stronger verse in my eyes and seeing them get some credit would be fun. Even if it’s just a comedy adventure, I could see both sides getting some decent Lego fights in there and the format would also mean that Superman wouldn’t need to hold back! If he broke his opponent, it would just be accompanied by a pun after all.

If I have a complaint for this adventure, it’s just the same complaint that I have with basically all Lego films. A lot of the jokes you’ll see a few miles away and they tend to not actually be that funny. I typically won’t laugh at any of the jokes, but I tend to not laugh at most jokes so it’s not saying much. It’s fairly enjoyable, but I’m still not a fan of Lego animation either and it does prevent the specials from having any real fight scenes. Again, it’s more a complaint for the format than anything and watching this is still a nice way to spend 20 minutes.

Overall, The special is pretty fun. It makes for a fun little watch and that’s why there’s not much to say about it. To an extent, it’s like reviewing an episode, which is why I don’t do that. It would be hard to elaborate an awful lot about it and even then, the average episode has more content to be discussed than a Lego film since the Lego adventure is just a quick battle without the extra layers of characters and plot. It works well for what it is and I still say that this is a fairly solid Lego adventure. It inflates the Marvel animation count and that’s what counts in the end. I recommend checking this out and you can watch it while cooking lunch instead of having a conventional timer.

Overall 7/10

How The Grinch Stole Christmas Review

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The Grinch is a classic tale that many likely grew up with or have at least heard of. I remember singing the songs for Choir and the concept behind the Grinch is decent enough. That being said, I was disappointed upon actually watching the original film. It hasn’t stood the test of time and is easily one of the worst Christmas specials on the block. If the Grinch didn’t have a dog, things would be different, but it’s simply too overdone for the duration of the entire film even if the ending is inspirational.

The Grinch is a creature who lives in a cave, but can never sleep because the aliens who live below are constantly making a ruckus with their loud instruments. They find it enjoyable so it doesn’t matter how loud they play. To punish these creatures, the Grinch decides to destroy their Christmas by stealing all of their presents and Trees, but are gifts really the meaning of Christmas? The Grinch is about to find out that material possessions aren’t enough to cancel such a joyous day.

This special is very short and is only about as long as your average cartoon episode. The Grinch goes around stealing everything until the end of the film where he realizes that it was all meaningless and turns over a new leaf. I have nothing against the actual plot and it wasn’t all that bad. This special was made around 50 years ago and the animation still holds up decently well. The Grinch’s character design is good and I still think that The Mask drew some inspiration from it. That being said, there is one thing that holds the film back.

The Grinch has a dog who is completely terrified of the fiend and is always forced to lead the charge in the Grinch’s wild plans You end up feeling bad for the dog since nothing goes his way and he’s constantly put in danger. If you’ve seen the Angry Birds trailer for the upcoming film, you’ll remember a scene where the main bird kicks another one into the ocean. It’s a very mean spirited way to show off the film and while it’s supposed to be funny, you have to question how you can laugh at such a deed. It just brings down the film and I’ll take crude humor over this nonsense.

The Grinch’s dog completely ruined the film for me. I doubt that the film would have gotten anything more than a 5 or maybe a 6 anyway, but that was not going to happen now. It’s not nearly bad as real animal violence from films like Hunger Games since it is still animated and nothing seriously bad happens to the dog, but the concept behind it is still not good.

Aside from that, the film was decently interesting. I do think that it would have been much better if the film took place on Earth so we could have some human banter from the other characters instead of them all just deciding to sing. We could have gotten a scene like in the Charlie Brown Christmas special where one guy tells the world the true meaning of Christmas and Christ’s birth. I can safely say that such a scene would have helped the film regain some of the ground that it lost thanks to the dog. The aliens aren’t bad, but they just seemed unnecessary and the odd world with its unique inventions were all right as well, but they also didn’t ultimately add anything to the plot. Not a bad thing, but I’d prefer a city like New York to be in the film any day. Since the Grinch is a good guy now, it would be interesting to see how the sequels handle the situation. Maybe he’ll just turn back the leaf and go to his old ways. I wouldn’t put it past the Grinch since he is not someone who should be easily trusted.

Overall, How The Grinch Stole Christmas may be a Christmas classic, but that doesn’t actually mean that it’s a good film. The Grinch is definitely a villain who you can root against, but he’s not a great character and his whole character arc happens very suddenly and not without a whole lot of foreshadowing. It makes you wonder what the point of his endeavor was. The film had a good ending though and at least the moral was sound. I thought that the animation was decent and there wasn’t really a soundtrack, but the film is old so that would have been very tough. I don’t recommend this film and if you want to watch something that’s a little more emotional, then I invite you to watch Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Careful though, it may bring tears to your eyes.

Overall 3/10

Pac Man Fever Review

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Nothing gets you hyped quite like a new Pac Man game right? That’s what I thought when I first bought this game, but after playing it once, I put it in the backlog with a lot of other games and I figured that I probably wouldn’t see it again for a very long time. Years later, I ended up taking it out once more to play it with my brother and my cousin as a party game always has the potential to be a blast. It’s much better with multiple people, I can tell you that for sure. That being said, this is still a game that needs a lot of work and should have been much better, but terrible decisions on the developer’s part limited the title.

There’s no actual story mode, but that’s all right. I wasn’t expecting one. You can go into the main Party Mode or have fun in Minigame Mode. That’s the only thing to do here so the game is going for quality over quantity. Party Mode has 4 worlds I believe and each world has its own set of minigames inside of it. The actual stage has long loading times though and each turn takes forever. This is one of my big complaints and it’s a little sudden, but let’s dive into this issue right now.

The main drawback that keeps this game from being very good is the fact that playing a single board will take a very long time. After each turn, each character will do a little dance, strike a pose, and then slowly walk up to the final area of where to go. Rinse and Repeat for all 4 characters, play the minigame at the end of the level…and then do it all over again. This is why I was bored out of my mind when I played the game on my own the first time. If you aren’t playing with anyone else, it’s a very boring experience.

I’m not saying that the actual minigames are bad though. I actually enjoyed them and the ideas were quite good. There were kart minigames and even some classic “Press A as fast as you can” ones in there. Minigames about timing and memorization…just a lot of options. There are a very good amount of minigames in the title even if you will inevitably playing them more than once. It’s why I don’t think it was a good idea to limit the minigames to each world. Combining them all into one world would give you more variety. Still, I did enjoy them and the minigames help save this game from being downright bad.

It does bring up another issue though, which is that the minigames aren’t available for free roam mode. In Mario Party, once you play the minigame once, you unlock it. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in this one. You have to use lottery points that you earn during the stage and that will typically come at the expense of actually winning the level, which is always disappointing. As a result, you’ll have enough coupons to maybe…maybe buy one minigame at the end of the level. So, you need to spend about an hour or 2 per minigame and there are quite a lot to unlock. It’s just not an efficient system and it takes forever to make any actual progress in the game. That’s not even counting the fact that each player’s coupon section is separate instead of merging the coupons from all players. It’s just terrible honestly and as a result, you’ll never want to play Minigame Mode since there are no good minigames to play. Better stick to Party Mode then.

The actual Party Mode is very much like Candyland or Trouble. You move along the course and the goal is to get to the end. You play a minigame and your rank in that battle determines how far you move. 5, 3, 2, or 1 step forward. Once you are near the end, you will need to come in 3rd, 2nd, and then 1st to finally win, which is actually a very good mechanic to even things up. This prevents a player from simply walking up to the goal line thanks to a few lucky rolls of the dice. It is sad to win a bunch of minigames only to find out that it still isn’t enough because you’re landing on bad spaces. It’s just not right!! I highly recommend playing the short version of each board to give yourself a nice estimate of how long the full version would take. Trust me, it does take a considerable amount of time so keep that in perspective.

I like the graphics to an extent, but I have to admit that they seem to be a little bad on a technical level. Everyone is very small, compact, and practically chibi. It’s very intriguing to see and it can be amusing, but the Gamecube can do better. The graphics are very dark and don’t seem to be very inspired. It’s possible that my Gamecube’s lighting is just starting to fade, but games like Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Mario Sunshine still look great so it may have to do more with the fact that nobody can stop Nintendo’s powerful graphics. These were good times!

As for the soundtrack, that part of the game was pretty decent. There’s a nice Pac Man remix and a few other tunes scattered throughout the game. Unfortunately, the main theme that plays during your walk through the board is very boring and doesn’t make you excited for the games. It’s essentially just elevator music and I expect more from my Namco games. It had such possibilities, but couldn’t live up to the potential.

Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of replay value here. The actual games take way too long and you can’t even have fun just playing the minigames on your own because they are just too expensive. Buying them is simply not worth putting the time into the games so the only form of replay value here is to grab a few buddies and have a quick game. As a group, it’s decently fun and that’s the only reason that it barely manages to pass a 5, but if you’re on your own, the game turns into a 4. It’s a shame that the game missed these opportunities since there’s no reason it should have even gotten under a 7. This was no cash in party game in terms of how the minigames went on. They all had heart and it felt like the developers put some effort into them. This was just nullified by the bad system of unlocking minigames.

Overall, Pac Man Fever is no Pac Man. I gained some respect for the game after playing it as a group, but that’s still not a good sign for any video game. You can buy it for a terrific price so that at least helps you to get your money’s worth, but there are better party games to get. Buy one of the older Mario Party titles and experience a true party game. Mario Party was and likely will always be the greatest party game on the block. (Smash Bros doesn’t count!) Everything that Pac Man Fever can do, Mario Party can do better. So despite the positive score, I don’t recommend picking up Pac Man Fever as long as better options exist on the market.

Overall 6/10

Lucario vs Kiva

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Kiva_(Let's_Go_Kamen_Riders)
Lucario is one of the more powerful Pokemon to enter the franchise. He has a great Mega form and his aura abilities can greatly amp up his physical and long ranged attacks. Kiva is very fast and has a lot of attack power as well, but I don’t see him putting up much of a fight this time. The gap in skill is just too big. Lucario wins.

Kiva vs Batman

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Kiva_(Let's_Go_Kamen_Riders)
Batman-Top-10
Kiva had a good start, but now it is time to face an extremely tough fighter. Batman may not have prep time, but he gets to start out with his two power rings and Superman’s overwhelming speed/strength. Kiva’s vampire abilities can’t compensate for that incredible amount of power and he shall have to take a loss here. Batman’s even got the tactical edge if necessary. Batman wins.

Madden 2015 Stats and Records

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Maddeen stats. I did quite good didn’t I?

PS4 Trophy% 49%

Gauntlet High Score 11

Skills Trainer

Basic Offense 100%
1 Bronze
2 Bronze
3 Silver
4 Bronze
5 Silver

Basic Defense 100%
1 Silver
2 Silver
3 Silver
4 Bronze
5 Gold

Football Concepts 100%

1 Bronze
2 Bronze
3 Bronze
4 Bronze
5 Bronze
6 Bronze
7 Bronze
8 Silver
9 Gold
10 Silver
11 Bronze
12 Silver
13 Silver
14 Silver
15 Silver
16 Gold
17 Bronze
18 Silver
19 Silver
Advanced Offense 100%

1 Gold
2 Bronze
3 Silver
4 Gold
5 Silver
6 Bronze
7 Bronze
8 Bronze
Strategy 100%

1 Gold
2 Bronze
3 Silver
4 Bronze
5 Bronze
6 Gold
7 Silver
8 Bronze

Battleship Review

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Have you ever had someone yell at you, “I sunk your Battleship!” before? Well if not, I’m afraid that this isn’t said in the actual game. I remember enjoying the film to a decent extent so I was pleased to start Battleship to see if the game would still be really solid. Alex Hopper would not be returning this time, but that’s fine since the plot is fairly minimal in this title anyway. The gameplay needs to be the selling point here. Battleship’s a first person shooter and while I like the gameplay style nowadays, it’s definitely not one that I tend to excel in. Normal mode provides me with a considerable level of difficulty so beating it on hard mode would be verrrry tough.

Aliens have invaded the planet so the marines are Earth’s best chance to stop them. It’ll be tricky and it’ll be dicey, but the main character has to pull this off. I forgot the name of the hero and I forgot the location (Hawaii islands I think) almost immediately but that’s all right. As I mentioned earlier, the plot simply isn’t that important. The whole game is filled with your boss talking about the communicator about the current situation and what you have to do, but it’s all fairly generic. You know that you have to take down the aliens and save the world. Don’t need to know much more than that to have a good time right?

The important part of the game is the gameplay of course and I’d say that Battleship succeeds in this area. It’s hard to really describe a first person shooter since it’s very self-explanatory. Point and shoot at the aliens, you don’t really need to know much more than that. FPS fans claim that the game is ultra easy and you can beat it on Hard Mode right off the bat. Don’t listen to them unless you are good at this genre. I’m not so normal mode made for a very good challenge and some levels took me well over an hour to finally complete. It was very satisfying to finally clear the level though. So, the game succeeded quite well with the core gameplay.

I do think that a cursor should always be on though since it makes shooting so much easier. It’s pretty sad to be firing at an alien with point blank range..only to keep on missing the shots. That just doesn’t seem right and you could tell that this wouldn’t happen in Call of Duty. Your jumping skills in the game are terrible and I forgot that I could jump for most of the game, but it’s not really a negative since jumping is never really necessary. Crouching was really handy and I highly recommend performing that action when engaged in a battle. Hiding behind rocks a lot of the time is also a good thing to do and it’ll make you feel like you’re in a classic Star Trek episode. If you’re feeling particularly bold, it’s fun to run into a group of enemies with your machine guns, but sometimes you’ll just end up dying right away.

The part of the gameplay that wasn’t so good was the actual Battleship mode. While fighting the enemies on the ground, you have battleships, which are fighting the enemy cruisers. They can’t do much without you so you have to enter the Battleship view and direct the Battleships on where to go and who to fight. It can get a little tedious with the loading times and sometimes you can control a Battleship with an item to really land some damage. It’s easy to beat the enemies, but…too easy. The final boss just involves you jumping into the Battleship and firing some of your lasers until it goes down. You don’t need to move, just spam L2, R2, and L1. It’s how you attack and moving is not necessary. It’s just not as fun as it should have been and that part of the game could have easily been cut out. Actually controlling the ship in a mode with more free roam could have been awesome.

I can’t say that the graphics are groundbreaking and they just aren’t very good. They’re not that bad and the game is fairly new so we’re not talking FFVII here, but it’s telling that the aliens actually look like humans throughout the whole game. It’s very easy to be striking one of your allies instead of an alien when the going gets tough. This isn’t a huge issue since your allies are typically knocked off as soon as possible, but the aliens should have had a better design and the graphics should have been able to make them stand out more. The enemies also sorta bleed when you blow them up, which is intriguing since the game officially has no blood. Contradictions like that have shown up in other games though and I’m guessing it wasn’t listed since it’s fairly mild and it’s basically monster blood. Still, it’s an area that the ESRB doesn’t have a lot of consistency with.

Battleship’s soundtrack is mostly nonexistent for large chunks of time, but it can be quite enjoyable. I remember that the beginning of the game was pretty epic although the soundtrack only played a small part in that. It’s not bad, but the themes also aren’t memorable so you will forget all about them in a very short period of time. I can’t say that I expected an all star selection of musical themes though so I was not disappointed.

Between the soundtrack and the graphics, Battleship did manage to be pretty epic though. The first level is actually very thrilling and tense as the game throws you into the action and the aliens begin their conquest of Earth. You would not suspect that the game was a movie cash in at first and you can easily get invested into the mission of stopping the aliens. The graphics and gameplay will eventually tip you off to the fact that this game isn’t exactly AAA, but it did put up a good front. The game loses its intrigue and mystery after the first level, but it was a great way to start off the game.

Each level should take you 30-60 minutes and some can last for even longer periods of time if you keep on dying. Luckily, some enemies tend to stay dead even after you die, which can help quite a bit. Just remember to take it slow sometimes and to pick off the opposing forces one at a time. There are around 8 levels, so the game length is decent. That being said, there’s not a whole lot of replay value to be found here unless you are planning to get the Platinum trophy. That will buy you some time, not a whole lot, but it will double the game’s length at the very least.

Overall, Battleship is a fun game and it’s definitely an FPS that I would recommend. It’s naturally not as polished as some of the other FPS titles, but it holds its own and who doesn’t want to go up against the big bad aliens? Beating the game on hard mode would certainly be a little impressive and I definitely wouldn’t mind a sequel for this game. It’d be a blast and hopefully the price would also go down pretty quickly as this one definitely goes for a bargain price nowadays. You can always find something good in the bargain bin!

Overall 7/10