Battle Clash

"Large Robots blowing the hoola out of each other! What more do you want??"

After making a risky descision to buy a super scope and 3 games, I came across the lovely beauty, and after a quick Super scope setup, found I had made one of the greatest descisions of my life!

You control a gunfighter, working with a pilot of a giant battle robot. Your mission is to destroy the evil Thanatos. That's the plot over with then. Basic? Of course, but if you brought this for the plot alone, shame on you!

Graphics: Rather basic, although there are some nice effects here and there. The backgrounds are wonderful, and give you a real sense of speed as you speed around the courses, each one is also varied, and you never feel like you've been to an area before

Sound: The music is beautiful. Each stage has it's own different music piece, and it caters for each theme accordingly. The sound is nice, it only covers laser fire and explosions, but it does it's job.

Gameplay: Here's the meat of the package. Rather then going through levels, each stage pits you against an opponent, who is in another battle mech, the objective being destroy them and don't die (obviously). The fight basically begins with your opponent jetting off either left or right, and you automatically following them. As you catch them on your screen, you can fire at them, they will obviously retaliate. Your opponent will, from time to time launch a charged laser at you, which really drains your energy meter, but you can block these, with one of your own, by waiting for the fire meter to charge, then letting rip. Not only can this block charged lasers, but it can also do damge to the opponent. Finally, winning battles may earn you a Plasma bomb, for aid on the next stage.

But thats not all! During each battle, you can aim at specific body areas of each mech. Fire them with a charge laser a couple of times, and BOOM! They'll blow up, limiting the opponents fire power. This can come in handy in a lot of missions, for example, on the first battle, when you've almost won. The opposing mech will aim and fire both of it's hands at you, causing big damage, it's very hard to target both of these with charge lasers, and you'll almost certainly get hit. If you blew the arms off previously, it'll just skip this phase entirely!

Finally, the difficulty curve is sound, and ranges from pretty easy, to absolute hell on earth...

...And that's just the easy difficulty...

Replay value: Argh! An almost god-like creation falls down to the 8 range because of this. After beating the game, you can access hard mode, but there's not really an incentive to play through it. You can however, play around with mechs, by seeing how much of their body you can blow away, which has a strange novelty value (It's incredibly amusing to see a flailing piece of floating scrap metal jetting around the screen doing nothing)

Overall marks:

Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 6/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Replay Value: 4/10

Overall: 7/10

Rent/Buy:

I doubt you'll be able to rent this with a super scope now, so look for a cheap scope with a copy of this game

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/07/02, Updated 11/07/02