Ocean Wars

The impressive text and presentation hides a rather nice Java spin on the classic Battleships game, as Ewan discovers on playing Ocean Wars

The description of Ocean Wars sounds like a great strategy game is about to start on your smartphone... "The long and desperate war between the four most powerful tribes of the galaxy Genesis Nine is close to an end. The deadlock can finally be broken if a skilled commander takes control of Aquarius, the last water planet left unspoiled by the war." The reality is slightly different. Welcome to the classic grid naval ‘battles' of.... [drum roll] "Battleships".

Yes, there are a few seconds of thinking ‘oh dear, this completely wasn't what I was expecting' but this passes once you get into Ocean Wars. The thing to realise is that traditional and classic games do very well on a platform, as long as you can tweak the title very slightly to give it a modern spin, without losing the appeal of the original.

Ocean Wars does this in the gameplay in two ways. The first is to allow up to four players to be involved, in the game, which can lead to a very cramped battle grid as all the players' ships are on a single grid (but it's a bit bigger than the classic 10x10, you'll be navigating 16x16 here).

The second is the weaponry available to you. The default is still a single shot lobbed up and down into a solitary square, hoping to impact against a bit of enemy ship. This is called a ‘Plasma Rocket' in your weapons inventory, and it sits alongside some lovely ideas that really help the game.

• Fusion Torpedo
  Will run straight and true from one edge of the grid to the other end, unless it hits a ship, so you can clear up to 16 squares in one move.
• Bongo Bombs
  An area effect weapon, will land bombs/guesses in five or six squares out of a ten square area.
• Kamikaze
  Sink any size of ship with a single hit.
• Gravity Bomb
  A more lethal cluster bomb than the bongo bomb, but over a smaller area.
• Spy Drone
  Allows you to scan nine squares and be told if a ship is in there or not - you just get a yes or no, not a scan of each individual square.

Mix all those up, with all bar the plasma bomb being limited to a few of each, and you have your new strategy twist, which neatly gets over the repetitive nature of Battleships. Congrats to the designers for that.

The other repetitive part, playing the same game over and over, is where the campaign mode hopes to help, and here it's successful, but not as much. You get yet another grid, with a corner for each colour, and as you play through Ocean Wars, the more games you win (or lose) the more this affects the balance of colour in this world grid. Win the games, and more new territory is yours.

Oceans Wars does break new ground, albeit only a little. But it is enough to make it a worthwhile game, and as you can pick up a copy for a month of play for £2 (outright cost is £5) it's a small payment for a classic game. The price is fair, the design is well thought out, and it does what it set out to achieve.

-- Ewan Spence, April 2008

 

Published by Ewan Spence at 23:04 UTC, April 3rd 2008

Categories: Games
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition

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