300

"Prepare for glory! Or something."

“Tonight we dine in hell!”

Ah, I apologize. I was just playing the mobile 300 adaptation and was pumped to spill some blood. The movie did have a lot of those grand exclamations, and I feel the need to capture the coolness of the film without resorting to running around in my undies.

300 is a mobile movie-based RTS – which sounds awful, I know. I'll be honest: I didn't have high expectations for this sucker, which only made it that much more surprising when I discovered that 300 is in fact a bloody good time, both literally and in the British slang sense. It's interesting that a mobile game is able to beat out its lousy PSP cousin, but it has nothing to do with the platform in question. The two versions of 300 are completely different, and whereas the PSP game was a sloppy action-brawler, the mobile game is actually a slick strategy game that feels more in line with its source material.

The basic story behind 300 is that King Leonidas of Sparta wants to go to war to protect his homeland from thousands (if not millions) of invading Persians, but religious restrictions limit him to sending a mere three hundred soldiers into combat. The film (and the game it inspired) follows Leonidas and his men through the Battle of Thermopylae, where the Spartans planned to hold off the enemy through careful tactics rather than numbers.

The game has the same concept. You're overwhelmingly outnumbered, and therefore you must take down your foes using strategy rather than brute force. 300 focuses largely on the lesson that any enemy can be overcome with the right amount of skill. The battlefields are small, barren, and contain no terrain features of any kind. Your concentration needs to be on the movement and positioning of the few troops you have.

A more appropriate name for this miniaturized rendition would be 8, as that's the highest number of Spartans you'll control at any given time. You move a cursor around and select destinations with the center button, which highlights an area with a large circle. If any enemy soldiers are within the circle, they'll be targeted, and your Spartans will plow through them as necessary. Most enemy types will simply move in on your group and attack, and the majority of battles will seem quite simplistic at first.

Not so. Your team of Spartans has three formations, toggled with the 1 key. Your basic rush stance has your soldiers running around at high speed, mobile but not well guarded. They can attack, but enemies can also attack back, and it's usually strength in numbers. Phalanx stance lines your men up, shielded and slow, invincible from the front but very vulnerable from behind. Larger groups can be taken down headfirst with this stance, but don't let them flank you. There's also a shield stance, which renders your soldiers immobile and is used to block incoming arrow fire.

Arrows are rarely incorporated into the gameplay, and only for brief moments. The meat of 300 will have you flipping between the first two formations on the fly, slicing through your foes in phalanx mode and occasionally repositioning your troops with the rush stance. Without such RTS conventions as terrain features and resource collecting, 300 puts the emphasis on pure, unadulterated combat. The game plays like the story it's based around: With careful planning and attack patterns, even the smallest force can conquer the greatest foe.

When you're down to the last three soldiers, you'll go permanently into rage mode, which grants you the speed of rush mode and the power of the phalanx stance. Things really kick into high gear when you get down to your final man, as the desperation kicks in and the lone soldier becomes a nigh-unstoppable Persian-slaying monster of a fighter.

The hell of combat is illustrated wonderfully on your cell phone thanks to the amazing blood effects, which might just be the most satisfying of any 2D game I've ever played. Blood sprays and heads fly, sure, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. As the body count rises, blood pools up on the ground, seeps through cracks, drips over the edges of cliffs… It's a sight to behold.

Multiplayer, unfortunately, is useless, mainly because they tried to pull it off on a single handset, which simply doesn't work. Thankfully, the game has a pretty sufficient single-player campaign and a challenge mode, which gives you some unique objectives and just lets you have fun. It's a meaty little package that I find quite appealing, given that this is a movie-based mobile RTS.

Pros

+ Captures the spirit of the film quite nicely.
+ Simple controls lead to surprisingly deep strategy.
+ Vast carnage.
+ Challenge mode extends play value.

Cons

- It's at times a little too simple.
- Multiplayer is pretty worthless.

Overall: 8/10

I enjoyed the movie very much, and 300 for mobile is a far better videogame adaptation than I ever expected to get, and a far greater RTS than I ever thought I'd see on a cell phone. Part of 300's excellence lies in its ability to draw quite a bit of depth from its simplicity, leading to a very satisfying strategy experience. And, as is often the case with games that employ such a thing, the over-the-top gore makes the whole thing that much more fulfilling, especially when you take into consideration the fact that it's being done on what's essentially a handheld. At eight bucks, 300 fans should download this baby.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/07/07