Battleground

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy / Board Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Sabec

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Review:

Battleground is a Strategy game that fans of the classic board game Battleship might find familiar. I say that because this game is Battleship with military jeeps and tanks and an off-brand name. Okay, time for me to bring out my old mantra on knockoffs: there’s nothing wrong with a knockoff, so long as it’s a good knockoff. So… is this game a good knockoff, then?

Graphically, this game uses pretty underwhelming 3D visuals, and the explosion effects are even more underwhelming. I give the game credit for having the player take the perspective of someone on the ground firing mortars from a turret – this is a clever way of bringing the player more into the action, which helps to keep it from having the same anaesthetic feel of its board game origins. However, this contributes to one of the game’s major problems, the lack of information given to the player.

Players’ screens are mostly dominated by the readout on the turret they’re manning, which basically just shows the enemy grid in a very simple, abstract fashion. Aside from this, players are given a score of the number of vehicles each side has left, and that’s it – no indication of which vehicles each side has left, and most notably, you can’t even see your own side of the battlefield as it’s getting picked apart by the enemy.

What’s more, this game is full of localization errors, such as telling you “enemy destroyed” when what has happened is that one of your vehicles has been destroyed. Combined with the lack of information given to the player, this makes the game an unnecessarily confusing experience. Seriously, they managed to make Battleship confusing.

I should also mention this game’s multiplayer with is… let’s just say laughably quaint. Players are actually directed to look away from the screen while their opponent sets up their side of the battlefield, complete with a little cartoony face covering his eyes, running completely counter to the otherwise somewhat realistic military presentation of the game.

Battleground isn’t helped by the fact that the official version of Battleship on the Nintendo Switch is actually a very good version of the game, but even if that weren’t the case, it would be a pretty terrible knockoff, with lousy graphics, a terrible localization, and a lack of vital information given to the player. Don’t bother with this one.

tl;dr – Battleground is basically the classic Board Game Battleship, but with tanks instead of ships. However, the presentation is lacking, the localization is so bad it’s actively confusing, and the lack of information players are given seriously cripples the gameplay. If you want Battleship, just get Battleship, don’t bother with this.

Grade: D-

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