Overview
ChartFight Battleship is very well-done and brings the classic board game of Battleship to your iPhone. Take turns shooting at a blank map trying to hit your opponent’s ships. You are notified if you hit an enemy ship, so it is up to you to use educated and systematic guesses to take down their fleet before they take down yours! Good visuals and well-implemented gameplay overcome a couple drawbacks to make ChartFight Battleship plenty of fun.
Tap a square to target it, press fire to fire. Easy! Setting up your ships is done by touching and dragging, or you can simply shake your phone to get a random setup.
Aside from figuring out how to set up your ships (which you’re instructed on), you’d have to be one brigantine short of a fleet to be confused with this one.
The game apparently features a dedicated server that allows you to play against other Naval commanders. I was unable to find anyone on at the time of review to play against, nor do I have a buddy with an iPhone. Assuming this works, this is a great thing to have in a game.
Breakdown
The Good:
I really enjoyed the visual themes here - I feel like the old map worked a lot better than a modern style would have. The sounds were appropriate and nonintrusive. I never encountered any framerate issues (or any technical issues for that matter). This is not a huge surprise with a game this small in scope, but still my pleasure to report.
Battleship was never really my thing when I was young. One reason might have been that the only person I ever played with was my grandfather, who turned each game into a recount of historical naval battles. Another might have been that figuring out coordinates and keeping track of all the information felt a bit overwhelming to my young mind. Thankfully, this rendition of Battleship automatically keeps tracks of where you’ve shot and what you’ve hit, making the gameplay effectively point and shoot. There are no unwelcome history lessons either, which I was exceedingly grateful for.
The Bad:
The main problem here is that this app cost five dollars, which is an absurd price considering some of the other apps I’ve played for free that contain far more depth than this one. There is a solution - I believe there’s a single-player only version of the game that is free. I think it’s a good setup to give away the single player version and charge for multiplayer, but five bucks seems very excessive.
Another let-down was the lack of information I was given. A one-time tutorial came up the first time I started the app, but I couldn’t figure out how to access that information again. Though the interface was fairly obvious as to what did what, if I had had no idea how to play Battleship, this app wouldn’t have taught me. Considering the low amount of effort that would have been required to make the end user feel taken care of, I’m a bit annoyed that they couldn’t add a “how to play” screen.
Verdict
I think there’s a great market for boardgame remakes on the iPhone. In fact, I’ll try to investigate and see if there are any versions of Stratego or Risk out there. I absolutely recommend downloading the free version of this app. If you and a friend want to play each other, get the full version. Since I’m reviewing the full version, the score takes a hit in the value department. This app - multiplayer or not - isn’t a $5 app.
