#oneaday Day 605: Cheap Crap

I've mentioned a few times recently about how great it is that the outgoing seventh generation of consoles has entered "games for 50p" territory. You can pick up an armful of Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii games for pocket change these days, and it's a great opportunity to try out some things that you didn't want to spend £40-50 on back in the day.

One thing that I've been really enjoying doing is picking up games that reviewed especially poorly and giving them a go. These are the games that are really cheap now — and if my experiences with some of the supposed garbage from the PS2 era is anything to go by, there are some surprisingly enjoyable experiences to be had among them.

Over the last couple of days, I've been enjoying Double Helix and Activision's Battleship, based on the movie of the pen-and-paper game. Yes, that was a thing that happened, though I suspect most people have probably forgotten by now. The Xbox 360/PS3 game got absolutely panned back in the day for being, on paper, a stupid idea that is nothing to do with the essence of Battleship. (Interestingly, there was also a companion Wii and 3DS game that was more of a turn-based strategy-affair; this ended up being much more well-received, but by virtue of its host platforms wasn't talked about nearly as much.)

If you've never come across Battleship, here's the gist. Aliens have emerged from… somewhere under the sea, and are causing trouble in the Hawaiian archipelago. As silent-but-named protagonist Cole Mathis, it's your job to play a leading role in the obliteration of said enemy forces from the archipelago before they're able to solidify their position and set their sights on the wider world.

The plot doesn't really matter. I assume it ties in with the movie (which I haven't seen), but it really doesn't matter, because this is a game about, well, gameplay. You control Mathis from a first-person perspective and are able to do all the things you'd expect to be able to do in a console first-person shooter from 2012: you can walk, sprint, crouch, jump and look down your iron sights. You can carry two guns at once, plus up to four grenades. Different guns are more or less effective against different enemy types. And yes, since your foes are aliens, you can loot their bodies and use their own weapons against them — the most commonly seen is an enormously satisfying chaingun-like affair.

The big mechanical twist in Battleship is that you're on an island, and the ships of your fleet are all around you. With a tap of the left bumper, you can call up a strategic map to move your ships around. If you put them in marked strategic spots, you become able to call in bombardments from the sea, which can help even the odds in tricky encounters. But you also need to make sure that those ships stay safe — because the aliens have ships, too. As such, you'll need to move your ships around to engage the enemy fleet and keep it under control while also achieving your objectives on the ground.

This actually works really well. While you're in the first-person part of the game, there are constant readouts of your ships' status on screen, as well as an activity feed of what they're up to. Audible radio chatter also keeps you up to date on the situation, so you know when you need to switch to the strategic view and take action. Coolest of all, though, is the fact that you can actually look out to sea from the island you're on, and see the ships moving around and fighting.

Some interesting depth is added by the fact that defeated enemies in the first-person segment drop "wild cards", which can be used in the strategic view. Some of these apply upgrades to your ships, such as increased attack or defensive power or wider radar range. Some of them provide an immediate benefit, such as an instant repair. And the most fun is the "Ship Control!" (with an exclamation mark) card, which allows you to take direct control of a specific ship's guns and fling everything you have at their current target, with a hefty damage boost to help you sink your enemy's battleship.

None of this is super-complex — the "ship control" sequences are especially simplistic, but enjoyable enough regardless — but the combination of everything is enough to keep things interesting and varied, and as a result I've been having a genuinely good time with the game.

I understand the whole thing is only about four hours long, but then I paid a couple of quid for it, so that doesn't really bother me in the slightest. Full writeup (and possibly a short;Play video) coming up soon on MoeGamer.