Battle: Los Angeles Reviews

First of all, I hated the movie Battle: Los Angeles. Huge budget resulted in a terrible movie. They had great potential to create a good alien-thriller movie. The movie is about a band of US soldiers fighting against the alien invasion in Los Angeles.

The plot was terrible, it didn't make any sense. Unfortunately, I can't remember all the details, It's been like a year since I watched it. But some things still recall to my mind and piss me off. Like, where the hell is the backup? Where is air support, ground support, naval support, any support? Why is nobody helping these 5-10 soldiers, why isn't the great US army helping these poor souls who have to fight by themselves?

When I started playing the game, I couldn't possibly believe it is even worse than the movie.

Audio:

No music at all, except some crappy main menu tune made by 7-year old. Terrible gun and sound effects. The guns sound like what they usually sound in these 10-dollar budget games. Shooting with a toy gun makes a more realistic sound. You have only 3 different weapons + 1 turret which you will be using 2 times during the whole game for approximately 4 minutes. The lip-syncing is horrible and it's like 2 seconds off.

Score: 1/10

Graphics:

Muddy graphics with screen tearing. The animation and cutscenes look awful. The cutscenes look like they were made with Adobe Flash version 0.9 beta or something. The animations are extremely simple. There are only 2 enemy types in the whole game: The basic alien footsoldier named "alien" and the flying air-support ship called "air unit".
(Aren't these the most clever enemy names in existence?)

The alien soldier can only do two things: stand still and shoot, or duck. They usually just appear and then stand still. That's it. The air units look like floating paper bags. They just hover all around like a druken sailor. They kinda look like they would weight a few tons, but they are still like paper airplanes.

Score: 3/10

Gameplay:

It's a First Person Shooter. You just move on with your worthless AI team and kill aliens, then proceed into the next section and kill even more aliens. The game is extremely short, it only takes 45 minutes to finish a playthrough, or 30 minutes if you skip all the cutscenes.

Your AI-partners are completely worthless. They shoot the aliens, but inflict no damage and are unable to finish the aliens off. So you just have to shoot everything by yourself. If you skip too far ahead of your team, the game instantly kills you. So you can't take point at all.

Let's talk about the aiming. How hard it is to make a game in 2011 with proper weapon aiming? Really hard it seems. The sniper rifle's aiming is so slow, that the aliens have enough time to empty a full clip in to your face, before you are even able to take a shot. Aiming is stiff with all guns. Too bad you pretty much have to use the sniper, because the M16 assault rifles damage is worthless. You need to empty the whole clip of it to kill one alien. The third weapon is the rocket launcher. You will need it to finish off the alien-ships.

The sprinting doesn't work well. The guy can sprint for maybe 5 meters, then he needs a 5-second break to even move properly. Great soldier we have here. Was this guy at home just eating doughnuts? Meanwhile,
a giant alien vessel is shooting rockets in to your ass and this guy is just resting. Unbelievable.

A funny thing is that after you beat the game, a big text "THANKS FOR PLAYING!" appears and there is no end-credits. It just goes straight back to main menu. It's more like: "THANKS FOR GIVING US YOUR MONEY!" It's like the developers are so embarrassed by the quality of the game, that they don't want their names to be seen.

I investigated and found out that the game was made by Saber Interactive subsidiary Live Action Games. I think this studio is from Russia, but I'm not entirely sure.

Score: 2/10

Achievements and value for money:

Achievements are really simple and the only reason why someone would ever buy this game. The whole 200 points can be achieved in 2-3 hours, but you will have to do 3 playthroughs as the difficulties won't stack. The game costs 800 Microsoft points, but even at 400 Microsoft points you still feel like robbed. Funny thing is, that writing this review took me a longer time than one playthrough of the actual game.

Shocking fact from Wikipedia:

"The Xbox 360 version of the game received generally unfavorable reviews on Metacritic, scoring a 39 out of 100 based on 21 critics. Despite poor reviews, it sold over 60,000 copies on the Xbox 360 as of year-end 2011."

Isn't that just nice. A lot better games get fewer sales, because they are not in the same genre as the big-sellers like the Call of Duty franchise. I guess this is like COD with aliens and a really low budget.

Closing comments: This game is bad and you shouldn't buy it.

1.0