Battle: Los Angeles was released on Xbox Live Arcade recently to coincide with the theatrical release of a movie by the same name. In the game aliens have invaded Los Angeles and you have to try and prevent L.A. from falling under alien control. As I went through the campaign I had definite vibes from the movie Independence Day. The concept appears to be incredibly similar and if you have seen that movie then you can already guess how this game ends. One of the problems is that the movie Independence Day is longer than this game. This is a game that only exists because of its theatrical counterpart.

As soon as you start the game you will immediately notice that this game looks a little too generic. Some of the environment are destructible, which is a nice touch, but other things are simply too boring. You are essentially fighting one enemy the whole game and you have a very limited selection of weapons to choose from. The hit detection seems to be off at times and I found myself using the sniper rifle as much as I could because the enemies would almost take a full clip of any other gun to go down. As I was familiarizing myself with the control scheme for the game I was also stunned to discover that there is no melee button. Fortunately the guns reload fairly quickly but a melee attack is always good to have if you have an enemy that got the drop on you and your character is about to get taken out. On top of all of that there were a few times when the frame rate would momentarily stutter. This game is also single player only so there is no chance for replayability after you go through the incredibly short campaign, unless you want achievements.

There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this game. The game isn’t broken by any means but there is nothing special here either. I feel sorry for the team over at Saber Interactive because they were only given six months to work on this game. In that respect, they turned out a pretty good product for such a short development cycle. Whoever hired Saber to develop this game really screwed them over by not giving them sufficient time to really make this game shine. It is almost like Konami had this last second idea that they should make a game based on an upcoming movie about aliens and they forgot that it takes longer than six months to make a quality title. With titles like Killzone 3, Homefront and Crysis 2 that have been released over the last two months there really isn’t any reason to download Battle: Los Angeles. I would really like to see what this development team could do if they had a decent budget to work with and were given the time to properly make a game. I can’t really recommend this at the current $10 price point. If this title is ever put on sale then you might want to give it some consideration. The best thing to do is download the free demo and try it out yourself. If you end up liking it then wait for when it is on sale. Otherwise, simply go back to your shooter of choice and have fun.

Score 5/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network