Battle: Los Angeles the video game is an interesting tie in with the movie. Many have referred to the movie as Call of Duty with aliens, well looks like someone heard you as Konami has released a Battle: Los Angeles game on the Xbox Live Arcade on Xbox 360 for a mere 800 points (about $10). The game puts you straight into the battle with the aliens, but with such a small price tag, could it be too low budget for first person shooter fans?
You should not expect an insanely complicated game for a whole $10 and Battle: Los Angeles for the most part delivers on this price tag. The graphics are pretty good for such a budget game with nice explosions and destructible environments, some of the animations and voices don’t really match up to the speaking. After a short intro you are thrust into the game straight off blasting these aliens who have invaded Los Angeles. There are three weapons you will be using, the assault rifle, sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. You also get to hop onto a turret of a Humvee every now and then to blast some of the baddies. I found the sniper rifle the hardest to use, mainly because of the insanely slow reload times. The default controls are little odd, you cannot assign your own buttons, you need to scroll through some default configurations to see if you like any of them. The most important option to adjust is the look sensitivity; the default is really sluggish and slow. There is also a jump button, which frankly is useless, you can jump about 1 inch off the ground, so you can actually finish the whole game without jumping once. You don’t have a heath meter, instead the game turns black and white with the whole game slowing down into slow-motion. This slow motion is kind of interesting as even the audio slows down and gives you a quick indication you should crouch behind some cover before you die from enemy fire.
There is pretty much only one alien you will be battling throughout the whole game, they seem to be quite tough to take down, so you’d better aim for the head. The zoom is very useful on every single weapon, so if you think firing from it at a distance without the zoom will just make you lose ammo. Speaking of ammo, there seems to be an insane amount of ammunition and grenades everywhere through the level, so don’t worry too much about running dry. Even the parts where you need to use the missile launchers has ammo boxes nearby.
The story is pretty basic as you trying to rescue some civilians from a police station, the cut scenes are comic book style with very little animation. Some of the voice acting isn’t quite up to snuff and you might just chuckle in some of the cut scenes.
Being slightly priced above an HD movie rental, you get about an hour of single player gaming. No online, no multiplayer, pretty much you can play the game on Easy , Normal and then Hard to unlock all the pictures and videos of the development process such as wireframe animations of the enemies. I was motivated enough to play through it on all the difficulties and enable some of the mods that are unlocked (double physics for example) and of course get some Achievements to show off to my friends.
This could be an interesting series of games if Konami decides to continue this model, we hope that will create more “sequels” of this game, even without the Battle Los Angeles franchise name. Buying a game at 800 points (roughly $10) apiece might be extremely attractive than shelling out the $60 for a full game. While not the best first person shooter out there, and lacking a bit of polish when it comes so the game itself and lack of replayablity…it does have potential. Buy Battle: Los Angeles on the Xbox Live Arcade from your Xbox 360 Game Marketplace.
Gameplay
Graphics
Sound
Overall
