BattleSport

If you're in the market for two-player battle-tank combat on your 3DO, BattleSport could be your ticket to play. BattleSport challenges you to win a 50-level soccer-style competition while side-stepping salvos from the opposition. The soccer angle means you must develop strategies, such as fake shots, to win.

You can select tanks with unique weapons and defenses. Two-player mode features a split screen and single-player mode pits you against the A.I.

Texture-mapped, rendered 3D tanks and arenas give BattleSport a realistic look. The original soundtrack in Dolby Surround Sound should rock.

Overview

BattleSport makes its way onto a crowded game scene with an arcade action sports theme with some nitro thrown in. You get to pilot a battle tank as you attempt to outmaneuver and outgun your opponent while trying to slam the ball through the goal. Sounds fun? It did for me, so with my brand-new Pentium II hungry for a graphics smorgasbord, I set out to give it something to chew on. Thinking BattleSport would be just the right challenge for my new toy, I threw it in the CD-ROM drive and fired it up, waited about 10 seconds for installation and loading, and realized I was in for a prehistoric flashback.

Gameplay

There's not much to it: you hop in your tank and go hunting for the ball while trying to avoid enemy fire. Power-ups can be found on the arena floor, including health that restores your shields, an eyeball that renders your ship invisible, and a clock that adds a minute to game time. Your ship, too, can be equipped with such power-ups, including the ability to jam your opponent's radar, block his shots on goal, or magnetically draw the ball toward your ship. If there is any strategy involved in BattleSport, it centers around these power-ups. You can configure your tank to have varying degrees of equipment, so you can make it more of a challenge if your opponent is more powerful than you. Does that make sense? In 10 words or less, it's a fancy way of changing the difficulty of the game.

Multiplayer is only supported in split-screen mode, so I will NEVER play it, and the AI is easily conquered with time. I quickly became bored with this game, and could not wait to write this review so I could archive BattleSport with my old Apple II stuff.

Graphics

If you have read any of my past reviews, you know graphics are a big deal to me. BattleSport made me cringe in pain and anguish. Why do the graphics have to be so poor?!? At least make the game fun to look at. The graphics in Battle Sport remind me of the late 80s when Wolfenstein 3D came out -- blocky and only sort of 3D-looking. I almost wanted to throw in a vintage VGA card to complete the experience. Add to that a horrible physics model and you get an outdated version of Hover. I will say no more; let's just get it better next time.

Documentation

This seemed okay until I encountered all those fun interface problems. It was then that I wanted to burn the manual (along with the game). Which brings me to ...

Setup/Configuration

These types of problems can break a game before you even get started, and Battle Sport got off to a bad start right away. Just before the main menu, for example, is a screen which reads, "Hit Enter to continue." If you have a game pad or joystick plugged in, you are in for a surprise. Doing this sends you to the credits screen, and after you have gotten a good look at who did this, you hit Escape or Enter or the space bar, and find yourself pitching back and forth between the credits, the main menu screen and the arena, seemingly without any control. Heck, I started LAUGHING and thought to myself, "My new computer is just too fast to handle this outdated code."

Bottom Line

Well, I've probably said it all; let's just move on and try to forget this one. I would not recommend it to anyone (unless you still have that old 386). On a positive note, I still really like Acclaim and Studio 3DO. They have put out some excellent titles, and I look forward to their next one. As for BattleSport, I barely feel good about giving it a 30 out of 100.