Amoebattle

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1

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Review:

Amoebattle is a Real-Time Strategy game released in 2012 on mobile devices Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service and later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released. This game has players commanding an army of microscopic organisms on a mission to hunt down and learn about other microscopic organisms.

This game’s visuals feature colorful 2D visuals. These mostly work pretty well, though different unit types often look a bit too similar to one another. However, the real issue with the presentation is the sound, namely the music, which blares through the Nintendo 3DS speakers in a way that will have most players scrambling to turn the volume down within seconds of starting the game.

As for the gameplay, there’s some good news, and… a lot of bad news. In terms of good news, I can say that this game does a good job interpreting the core mechanics of RTS games to work on the touchscreen, giving players good ways to select single or multiple units, to assign them to target a specific unit or an area, to assign selected units to up to four memorized groups, to quickly change control and/or the camera to one of those groups, and even to shift the camera to a specific area. All of this is explained early in the game’s campaign, and works pretty flawlessly.

The problem is… well, everything else.

Where do I even begin. The small screen size combined with the relatively narrow space of the levels and the way your units cannot occupy the same space means that simply moving your group around can become laughably inefficient. It also doesn’t help that the pathfinding of these characters is pretty bad too. Units have unique traits, but your control over them is just limited to “move here”, “attack here”, “spawn more units”, and “transform into different unit types”. You can’t get a good feel for your resources when it comes to upgrading units because your resources aren’t pooled – each unit has their own. The number of units you can have in your army is limited to a few dozen. And the most disappointing flaw here is the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode.

I still give Amoebattle credit for presenting us with a fully-functional Real-Time Strategy game on Nintendo’s handheld, but even with well-crafted controls that function surprisingly well, the rest of the game is a mess of frustrations that make this feel like a promising prototype that was then handed off to someone less skilled to complete the game. It’s unfortunate, Nintendo could definitely use some great Real-Time Strategy games on its handheld devices. Sadly, Amoebattle is far from great.

tl;dr – Amoebattle is a Real-Time Strategy game that has players commanding a horde of microscopic critters. Unfortunately, while this game does a superb job creating controls that work well on the touchscreen, it drops the ball with pretty much everything else, with some poor game design decisions, limited gameplay, a lack of multiplayer, and terrible music. This game is still well worth playing to get a feel for how one could do a great Real-Time Strategy game on a handheld with a touchscreen, but this game itself falls far short of “great”.

Grade: C+

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