War of the Worlds

""This is an extermination.""

Forget gameplay, forget story, forget graphical prowess, forget innovation… The selling point of the War of the Worlds mobile game is in its concept – you actually get to take control of one of those tripods from the 2005 Steven Spielberg movie. You know, one of those giant, mechanical beasts that rise up from the ground and start vaporizing people with death rays? One of those things that kidnap us puny humans, drink our blood, and then spray it over the planet to produce vile weed? One of those things that completely freaked us out the first time we saw them? Yeah, you get to control one of those. How about that?

There's actually a pretty competent little shooter here that's based around this promising idea. Levels are handled in a linear, side-scrolling fashion, and enemies are simply handed to you, one after the other, so you can blast them and laugh at how pathetically weak and obsolete they are. Puny earthling forces, you are no match for the superior power of our advanced alien weaponry! This is a feeling of power at its absolute highest. At the control of a ginormous tripod, you're given some cool abilities for all your human-squishing desires. The death rays, unfortunately, have been replaced with more generic fireballs, though I gather that death rays themselves are only good for wasting organic matter, and thus fireballs are better for fighting tanks, planes, helicopters, etc. The tripod's tentacles can be used to pick up and throw objects, or to harvest fleeing humans. You can also summon the screen-clearing power of a “special attack” that rains lighting on your opponents.

The tripod itself is a bulky machine that takes up quite a bit of space on-screen, and while you can move it to the left and right to dodge bombs and such, you'll mostly just let it cruise along at its own pace. Worlds is about the ability to aim and fire at multiple opponents quickly. Though the game starts off too easy and ends too hard, most of the missions are well balanced and feature a number of obstacles and opportunities to score points. Since you can't always just avoid enemy projectiles, you'll have to instead rely on moving the cursor and firing at them to get them out of the way. Since the restrictions of the mobile gaming industry prevent simultaneous button presses, you can't aim and fire at the same time, therefore increasing the challenge. That's okay – Worlds' levels are rarely so intense and frantic that you'll need a quicker, more user-friendly control scheme.

In the movie, the tripods were covered with force fields that prevented physical damage, making them damn near unstoppable. This would make for a very boring and uneventful game. While your tripod does have a health meter (which results in a “system failure” if you're ever to take too much damage at once), developer Gameloft chose instead to provide challenge through a time limit (the aliens, it seems, run on a tight schedule – you know, with all that galactic domination stuff). Every time you take a hit, you lose time on the clock, and while each level has a specific length, they all end with a boss battle. Bosses themselves can take a large amount of time to defeat, so you'll often find yourself replaying levels to gain more time for the fight at the end. Some of the later bosses were simply way too cheap, relying on the constant-fire-from-every-direction technique that's simply too much for the game's slow controls, but for the most part, it's a good way of handling difficulty.

Gameloft made the right choice in not focusing too much on story here – the only plot we're given is presented in the form of brief, non-distracting news broadcasts that simply update us on the situation. And thankfully, Tom Cruise's Scientologist ass is nowhere to be found. The decision not to center around a human story for this game and instead provide control of a tripod is not only a very cool experience, but it actually works pretty well from a gameplay standpoint, as while the game starts off slow and concludes with too hard a blow, it's a respectably entertaining diversion. Worlds also looks great. The tripod, which may in fact be one of the coolest and scariest alien spaceship designs I've ever seen, is reproduced and animated perfectly, and the screen fills with action and never shows a hint of slowdown. Impressive.

Pros

+ Control one of the tripods from the movie!
+ Decent level design and variety in enemies makes this a fine shooter.
+ Great graphics – the tripod animates wonderfully.
+ No attempts at story here.
+ It's just so damn cool…

Cons

- Gets off to a slow start.
- Some of the action is too intense for the slow controls.
- No death rays? WTF?

Overall: 7/10

War of the Worlds is a good enough game (at a low enough price) that I can see myself recommending it to any fans of the film that jump with joy at the thought of driving one of the movie's huge, frightening tripods. It certainly feels nice to rain terror on so many unsuspecting humans, even if the death rays are absent. And as a game, it works just fine as a more slow-paced side-scrolling shooter. I really don't know what else I can say, so I won't fluff out this review. You have my opinion, so make up your own mind before engaging in a download.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/27/06