Warships: Sea on Fire

Warships: Sea on Fire – There she blows capt’n!

If life on the ocean wave is something that you find calling to you, or if you just like to blow stuff up – or better yet, if you love blowing the heck out of ships in the water, then cast your eyes upon this.

Warships: Sea on Fire is a remake of the classic Battleship board game. Guesswork and intuition play an equal part to the element of luck and being able to outwit your opponent. Whether you want to play by yourself and challenge the AI opposition or fancy competing with a mate, you have the ability to do this here.

There are three AI difficulty modes, easy, hard and God mode. Easy proves quite a challenge as the opponent will pinpoint your ship on the grid and do their worst in destroying the craft within the next turn. Hard seems to be a little better at finding your ships and will certainly mean you will improve your game if you’re going to come out on top.

God mode however seemed a little bit hit and miss – quite literally. Within a few turns you will find one or possibly more of your ships either damaged or taking a plunge to the depths below. Unlike the other settings, rather than using the additional turn you get as a reward for pinpointing the ship, the opponent takes a random shot somewhere else in the grid and occasionally coming back to finish off the stricken ship. This is quite clever in some respects but also a little odd too but the method behind the madness does seem to pay off – and you will need to work feverishly to win.

The game controls are all touchscreen based. Point to the square you wish to target and press fire is as technical as it gets. The only fiddly bit comes with picking the ship and slotting it into place. On more than enough occasions I couldn’t select and drag the ship to the desired position which was a bit poor, especially when iPod’s best and main feature is the sensitivity of the screen.

The graphics, sound and overall fun are certainly more than adequate and you can even upload your score if you wish. How this game is scored is a little beyond me but I’m sure the fewer turns you take, the less damage you receive and how effective you are in wiping your opponent out, the better the score.

If you like the boardgame, you’ll enjoy this game for killing a few minutes and giving yourself a bit of a challenge. You’ll probably find this game a little more entertaining when competing against a friend using the Bluetooth settings. It’s just a shame that unlike other games it doesn’t connect to the web to find a competitor somewhere else in the world – but perhaps that war would end up being a bit too much like the real thing?!

Rating 75%

Positives

Pretty entertaining and random fun

No frills and captures the element of the boardgame

Good AI and Bluetooth options mean this has some shelf-life

Negatives

Touch controls do let it down a little bit – especially when setting the board up

It doesn’t connect to the net to find global players looking for a human opponent

It would be nice if you could send messages to your opposition