Battlemorph (CD)

Atari Jaguar CD

by The Big Bad Wolf

Overview:

You start out with an FMV cut scene of the 'story so far'. "This is the battlecruiser Sutherland ...". Your mission is to help find the Pernitian homeworld and destroy it before they begin another war of conquest. Standard fare for a shootemup game.

Options:

Control customization and controller type.

Volume control.

FMV on/off.

Opening screen lets you choose up to 6 save games. After choosing a savegame slot, if you are starting new, you get to input your name, if not, it takes you straight to the planet selection screen. After you input your name, you get to choose the difficulty of the game (easy, medium, hard). At the planet selection screen for the Zephyr cluster, you get to choose from the planets Penter, Silur, Peramer, Kalmer, and Bandyr. I'm not sure just how many other clusters there are or if there are varying numbers of planets for them, as I have not made it past the first cluster yet.

After picking a planet from the cluster, you get taken to a cut scene of launch and teleport to the planet. From there, you're on your own.

Graphics:

The planets look to have a nicely sized area to explore and blow up. There is nice texture mapping of the backgrounds and enemies. Your own ship looks very good, even if it looks like it needs a few more polygons and a little more texture mapping. Not perfect, but very very good. The missiles and cannon shots are very good and well animated as are the enemies. There is no hint of frame rate drop as you encounter more enemies or get more objects on screen. Very smooth movement and animations. Not perfect, but certainly a nextgen game by any stretch.

Sound:

Voices are crystal clear and the sound is very *crisp* with no hint of pops or crackle, even on my stereo system. Some of the explosions sound a bit fuzzy with not 'crunch' hitting me in the chest. The music is okay, but then again, I'm not very big on music in a game.

Playability:

Incredible! You can go ANYWHERE in this game: you can go underwater, you can go above water, you get tunnels and of course, flying through the air. There are powerups galore, there are a bazillion enemies, the radar is actually useful. If you hated Cybermorph, you may still not like this game, despite the added enhancements of graphics and sound. What I did notice was a bit of randomness and chaos that made playability nice.

What I didn't like:

Could've used a little bit more polygons and t-mapping. The music could have been more of a 'hard-rock' style, much like Blue Lightning was. Now there was music you could slam to!

Ratings:

Graphics:     7

Sound:       7.5

Playability:  8.5

Overall:      7.5

-Keith C. Estanol,  "Big Bad Wolf"