Are you a fan of the old battleship game from Milton Bradley? If you are, you will certainly love iBattleships iPhone app which seeks to recreate the experience of playing the game against your best friend after school.
Digital recreation of the interface
The interface for the battleship game is created in exact replica detail digitally in iPhone iBattleships app. The grid is the exact same size and all of the different ships have the same number of squares and the same overall design as you would have seen in the figures that came with the game. That means that you have a 2-hit PT boat, a 3-hit submarine, a 3-hit destroyer, a 4-hit battleship and a 5-hit carrier making up your task force. As is the case with the original game, you are going against an opponent that has the exact same task force at their disposal.
Game play is exactly the game
Just like the interface is a recreation of the classic game, so too is the game play. You and your opponent will each take a turn announcing that you are firing on a particular square on the opposite grid. Then, depending on whether that square has part of a ship in it or not, the opponent will announce that the shot has either hit something or missed something. Whenever a ship is sunk, those same classic words of “You sunk my battleship” will be announced with battleship substituted with whatever ship was actually sunk in the engagement.
As true to the original as a digital game can be
You have to give the people that created iBattleships iPhone mobile app credit. It certainly did seem as though they were trying to stay true to the original and by and large they were able to accomplish that particular goal. However, some of the original ambience of the game is missing. You are playing this on a tiny cell phone that was not even in existence when this game was hugely popular and as a result the feeling of sitting across the table from your friend, even if you manage to get it done, might not be the same as you remember.
Final Score
It might be nostalgia talking, but we feel that no digital recreation can ever truly hope to replace the battleship game that we grew up with. This app is fantastic though, so we’ve still given iBattleships iPhone app a final score of 9 out of 10 and a strong recommendation to download.
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