“Shit, I’d Rather be in Afghanistan.”
“I have a bag of C-4 on the bus.
Give this to my wife.”
XBLA release store icon.
We’ve seen licensed movie tie-in games come a long way in the past decade. Where rising to even the level of competence was once a rare treat (Enter the Matrix, Jaws: Unleashed, Scarface: The World is Yours and so forth), and genuinely great games came of it only once in a blue moon (GoldenEye 007, Spider-Man 2, The Chronicles of Riddick); the times have a-changed,[♫] and consumer expectations have changed along with them. Now when a hot new blockbuster movie comes along, players can look forward to playing absolutely nothing based on them! Yes, movie studios and game publishers finally seemed to learn their lesson somewhere around the time of the early 2010s, and movie tie-in games for consoles and handhelds have since come to a complete halt — to where the most you can expect to find now are usually just half-assed mobile games made to ape other already-successful apps. Balance has been restored, and justice has been served.
Yes, I’m deliberately playing somewhat facetious here: Production on [non-mobile] movie tie-in games never really stopped, so much as it has just dramatically diminished. When they do come out now, they’re usually homages to the glory days of legacy franchises — the likes of Friday the 13th: The Game or [INSERT STAR WARS GAME HERE]. And then every couple of years, you get something more contemporary like a Fast & Furious Crossroads to remind us why these sorts of games are usually a bad idea in the first place. It’s a cycle which does a solid job of keeping consumer expectations generally low, occasionally surprises them with something that has no right to be as good as it is (anybody ever play The Mummy Demastered?), and then swiftly crushes that enthusiasm with something expectedly soulless and wretched (anybody remember Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days?). Come to think of it, I guess that’s not really all too different from how things used to be…
If there was indeed something like a turning point for movie tie-in games, 2011’s release of Battle: Los Angeles might well serve as one of the prime suspects. As the interactive adaptation of a thoroughly underwhelming movie, Konami and Saber Interactive’s first-person shooter lives up to its source material by being a thoroughly disposable bit of interactive media; to be played once, quickly regretted, and just as soon forgotten. And with a price tag slightly higher than the going rate for a movie ticket, paired with a total playtime measuring at less than one-third the movie’s runtime, you can be sure that the disappointment on the part of unfortunate purchasers was as immediate as it was palpable. Today, we undertake the dangerous operation of discussing this ill-advised digital download — tracing its point of origin, coordinating a retaliatory review, and surveying the damage done in its wake. No bad game left behind, soldiers.
William Martinez: Looks like we’re getting into some heavy shit.
Michael Nantz: It’s been my experience, Lieutenant, heavy shit is highly overrated.
“So… You Girls Ready for a Fight?”
Theatrical poster for Battle: Los Angeles
(Columbia Pictures, 2011)
So, does anybody actually remember Battle: Los Angeles — by which I mean the motion picture, in this instance? I’ll go ahead and answer on your behalf by writing in “No,” and reassure you that you are most certainly not alone. In brief, it’s a “gritty and grounded” alien invasion action movie; the sort of which became briefly popular in the wake of the 2005 War of the Worlds remake, and which brought us flicks like 2011’s Cowboys and Aliens the 2012 Battleship movie. To provide the obligatory synopsis: Aliens invade Earth by landing on our continent’s coastlines, and promptly launch a full-scale invasion and systematic extermination of humankind, for reasons only briefly theorized / alluded to in the movie. The film follows a platoon of Marines mobilized within Los Angeles, who are initially tasked with rescuing civilians within the warzone, before ultimately deciding to undertake their own mission to try and save the city. Eventually, their American ingenuity wins the day and turns the tide of the whole war, but only after we lose half the cast of characters in what are supposed to be shocking, dramatic moments.
Your main character (and the actor the whole movie is meant to serve as a vehicle for) is Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz, as portrayed by Aaron Eckhart. He’s a Marine just a few days out from retirement, unwillingly thrust back into the role of a leader; despite a backstory involving losing a whole squad during his last deployment, and now being forced to work alongside the disgruntled brother of one of those former charges. Said brother – one Corporal Jason Lockett (played by Cory Hardrict) – is just about the only other character to receive any semblance of development over the course of the movie. See, the problem is, there are roughly a dozen other characters that the film expects you to care about and keep track of. That’s a big ask in the best of cinema, let alone some shlock action flick where half the dialogue effectively amounts to interchangeable military grunts shouting variations of “Oorah!”
Like, take the character of Cpl. Lee Imlay, for example: A cardboard cutout of a generic Marine, portrayed unspectacularly by Will Rothhar. The only way you can tell his character apart from any of the other white dudes dressed in identical BDUs is the fact that he has football eyeblacks painted on his face. His most memorable line is in response to someone theorizing that the invading forces are extraterrestrial, to which he says “You mean like from space?” I think that might be one of maybe twelve lines total he has over the course of the whole movie? He has no stand-out action scene or contribution to the narrative, and as such, his existence is largely pointless — the same as most everyone else whose actors weren’t coming in hot off the success of The Dark Knight. In short, Imlay is a complete nothing of a character, entirely unworthy of committing to memory or potentially investing in. Wouldn’t it be silly if he was somehow elevated to the role of “player character” in the video game tie-in?
Scene from Battle: Los Angeles (Columbia Pictures, 2011)
Hey, speaking of that video game tie-in, we should probably explore how it came to be! To do that, we need to first examine developer Saber Interactive: A joint American-Russian studio first established in 2001, with fleetingly brief credentials between then and 2011. When they first announced their presence near the turn of the millennium, they came prepared with two games already in development — a relatively unambitious first-person shooter, and a far more novel third-person title ‘The Genome Project.’ What made the latter interesting was the promise of DNA augmentation mechanics, wherein defeating the game’s genetically-modified enemies would grant you the ability to incorporate their powers into your player character; with perks such as “night vision, better aim, resistance to toxins or greater speed.”[1] Not only that, but your character’s physiology / model would also change as you further experimented on yourself, transforming you from a mere man to an abomination of mismatched flesh and circuitry. Needless to say, this whole game premise proved far too ambitious for the amateur studio, and as such it was quietly cancelled in favor of a full-time focus on that shlock FPS.
Promotional screenshots for ‘The Genome Project’
(Saber Interactive, unreleased)
And with that, Saber Interactive’s debut title would now be 2003’s Will Rock: Something like a Serious Sam clone set within ancient Greece theming, published by Ubisoft as a $20 budget title, and primarily developed to serve the purpose of establishing / showcasing their proprietary ‘Saber3D Engine.’ In that regard, it is successful enough in its mission; delivering a competent enough first-person shooter, even if not an entirely confident one. It suffers from combat arenas a tad bit too big for their own britches, waves of enemies that rise just a hair too high, and weapons which feel just a smidge too soft to effectively serve you in the proceedings at hand. It’s just hard to play Will Rock without your mind drifting off to thoughts of the better, more fully-realized games it originally sought to emulate. Despite all these minor complaints one might’ve had, the game was received well enough in its time, and managed to keep the lights on at Saber Interactive for at least four more years — for the length of time it took them to develop their next title, ‘Chronos’… though I suppose folk know it better now by its finalized title, TimeShift.
TimeShift is a truly odd duck of an FPS, remembered as much for its novel time manipulation mechanics as it is for squandering the full extent of their potential. Frankly, it’s a minor miracle the game ever managed to release in the first place: Between its original design under the ‘Chronos’ name seeming like a relatively minor mechanical and technical iteration on Will Rock (as evidenced by its earliest screenshots in 2004), Atari stepping up to fund and publish the game near the dawn of 2005,[2] promptly followed by Atari ridding their hands of it after disastrous reception to a 2006 demo release.[3] At this point, Vivendi Universal picked up the publishing reins, allowed Saber Interactive to gear up for a September 2006 launch, and at the last possible second – literal days before it was due to go “gold” – told the team to restart development nearly from scratch; in order to completely change out the game’s aesthetic, narrative, and underlying structure:
Will Rock on PC (Ubi Soft / Saber Interactive, 2003)
“As you probably know already, [TimeShift] has undergone a massive metamorphosis, but you may not be aware just how big the changes are. It’s potentially the stuff of gaming legend. Picture the scene: the team at Saber Interactive are literally days away from getting the game out the door. Seven bugs in fact. At the eleventh hour, they were given the opportunity to spend a year completely retooling the title. They took it (despite having to ‘talk a few guys off the roof’), and the result is a game that’s radically different from its earlier incarnation.” ~ Cam Shea, IGN
The finished game would ultimately drop the game’s originally intended player character “Michael Swift” (intended to be voiced by Dennis Quaid), in favor of an anonymous silent protagonist wearing a time-manipulating ‘Beta Suit.’ Its cartoony, steampunk visual style would be swapped out for more gritty urban environments and conventionally “high-tech” opposing forces. But what’s more important is what remained intact from its previous iteration: The abilities to rewind, pause, and slow down time; as powered by a massively-overhauled version of the Saber3D Engine, demonstrating some genuinely impressive visuals for the era. And though the product that finally released would seem to slightly underwhelm reviewers and consumers – with criticisms of its short length, lack of balancing between your time powers and weapons, and generally dull level design – Saber Interactive had still come out the other end of the tunnel a stronger company than they had been going in. But before we move on, I wanna quickly recommend reading the “postmortem” on the game’s development courtesy of Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), for those still wanting further details on TimeShift’s tumultuous timeline.
It’s in 2010 that Saber Interactive were approached by 343 Industries, with the proposal to release a remastered tenth anniversary edition of Halo: Combat Evolved — leveraging the latest version of Saber’s in-house engine to provide upgraded graphics, while still retaining Bungie’s original ‘Blam!’ engine to drive the core gameplay. It was a project they had roughly one year to develop and deliver, in accordance with the game’s hard-set November 15th, 2011 release date. Needless to say, Saber Interactive rose to this challenge, and have continued to be involved with the development of The Master Chief Collection in the years since. But there was still something else brewing within Saber Interactive in 2010 — another pair of games in development, which would be made to leverage licenses for the ‘Havok Destruction’ middleware which the company had purchased in the previous year. From a line in a 2009 press release which read “[Saber Interactive’s] next title will feature Havok-supported destructible environments in a city,”[5] it’s assumed that the title being referred to would ultimately become 2012’s Inversion. But their third game in concurrent development would remain a mystery — kept secret until just a week before its release.
Comparison of different design iterations of TimeShift on PC
(Sierra Entertainment / Saber Interactive, 2007)
On March 3rd, 2011, Konami would spill the beans on their soon-to-release Battle: Los Angeles tie-in game, as developed by a newly-established Saber Interactive subsidiary ‘Live Action Studios.’[6] According to testimony by Careen Yapp (Vice President of Acquisitions and Franchise Development for Konami), “We love the movie and it was a great experience working with Saber – there were some great ideas about how to expand the story into a game. It’s a great chance for gamers and moviegoers to play out the world of the film.” The press release goes on to further reveal that the game is “powered by the Saber 3D Engine,” and that “Players will battle unique and varied enemies using an arsenal of weapons throughout the game like an assault rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, frag grenades, and a turret gun.” Surely, that’s only just a small sampling of the no doubt multitude of weapons wieldable in the game, right?
According to rumor I currently have no way of substantiating (a blurb appearing exclusively on MobyGames’ profile for the company), the Live Action Studios label was established in order to develop the game in just “six months” time — presumably a B team unattached to the productions of Halo and Inversion, formed in order to crank out this quick bit of contract work. That much, I can readily believe. But there’s another interesting aspect of this speculation, which contends that the game’s budget was “self-funded” — presumed to mean that cash was taken out of Saber Interactive’s own coffers to complete the game, rather than any allotment provided by the publisher or movie studio. This would have to mean that Saber Interactive took the gig with the promise of “payment on completion,” and were left to determine how much of their own money they were willing to spend on producing the title. It’s not an entirely unheard of way to develop a game, but I’m still somewhat skeptical that Saber would’ve gone this route? But for the purposes of this article, we’ll be operating under the assumption that this odd bit of trivia is true, regardless.
I did at least manage to track down one speculative bit of “evidence” speaking to the game’s production time: A series of posts to the ZBrushCentral forums by user ‘eof3D’ — the alias of one Eugene Fokin, who was employed as a character artist / animator at Saber Interactive during that time. Within a long-running thread made to document his works in progress, he first unveiled a “sketch” render of Michelle Rodriguez’s head on September 20th, 2010. Though he didn’t attach her name, a poster in the thread quickly realized the likeness. Eugene would later acknowledge his involvement with the game on April 29th, 2011; posting his finished renderings for the heads of Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, and Ne-Yo over the course of the following week. Of further note is the fact that Eugene was left to model all these actor likenesses from “naked-eye measurement”; noting that the company Cinesite (who produced the film’s special effects) had digital scans for the film’s actors, but that the team behind the game weren’t able to reference “any scanned data of a real persons.” These would not be the last of the film assets that the team were denied access to. In any case, if you wanna use that first September 20th post as something like a rough estimate for around the time the game went into production, that’d certainly line up with that six month development estimate.
Scene from Battle: Los Angeles (Columbia Pictures, 2011)
For lack of any further insights into the game’s development process, there’s just one last thing I have to cover before we get to actually reviewing the game: On March 22nd, 2011, G4’s X-Play aired the 29th episode of its ninth season. During said episode, host Adam Sessler was granted a sit-down interview with Aaron Eckhart, in order to promote the movie and the game. What follows is an eight-minute masterclass in navigating a conversation where one of the participants has absolutely zero knowledge of [or interest in] video games, and failing to get even the smallest modicum of production insight out of them. See, Aaron Eckhart actually reprises his role as a voice actor in the game, and presumably would’ve been brought into a studio to record his lines. But of course, this aspect isn’t addressed at all; with Sessler instead left to make frequent comparisons of the new movie to Black Hawk Down, and Eckhart equating the arduous job of acting in the film to the trials and tribulations of real-life Marines:
“My thing as an actor is, I felt like I was at war every day. I felt like – (*Pointing to a screen playing back gameplay footage*) these streets and this overpass, right here – I felt like if I didn’t see beyond that, or I didn’t see my car or the driver or the lunch truck, I felt like I was at war. When I looked at my fellow actors, who were the Marines… (*Pointing back to the screen*) You know, this here right now is bringing me back — this is exactly like the film. I would look into their eyes and see that thousand-yard stare. I would see the fatigue, the heat — I would see almost their demoralized spirit, ‘cause there was ten hours left in the [shooting] day! (*Pointing back to the screen*) If I ever see that bus again in reality, I’ll either throw up or go postal on it.” ~ Aaron Eckhart
With this last bit of compelling promotion out of the way, the Battle: Los Angeles video game launched on Xbox 360’s Live Arcade and Steam on March 11th, 2011, in order to coincide with the debut of the movie in theaters. A release on the PlayStation 3’s digital storefront later came on March 22nd. Priced at $9.99 [or 800 Microsoft Points], the game’s store pages would promise “AAA boxed product visuals and heart-thumping 5.1 surround sound,” for those who dared to enter the digital fray. For reference: A ticket to see the film at a movie theater would’ve likely run you just eight bucks — before accounting for your $10 bucket of popcorn and $7 soda, of course. The question is, which product would prove to be the more satisfying entertainment experience?
Fun fact: This utterly useless movie also has its own equally useless licensed tie-in first-person shooter game! I guess you can expect that to show up on the site too eventually, huh?
“That Was Some Real John Wayne Shit, Staff Sergeant.”
In adapting a film to a video game, the game’s “faithfulness” to the narrative presented on the silver screen is contingent on a number of factors: Does the game have the benefit of coming out after the movie is already wrapped, or is it developed at the same time as the production is on-going? How much access / cooperation are the filmmakers willing to provide to the game’s development team? And if a film should undergo rewrites or reshoots during its production, does the studio behind the interactive tie-in get the chance to implement those changes on their end? In the case of Battle: Los Angeles, we can only really speculate, but I still think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what went down anyhow: Saber Interactive probably got a printout of the film’s shooting script, promptly tossed all the paper into the air, and decided that they’d only worry about however many pages they could catch with their hands before the rest hit the floor.
While I’m obviously joking, the game’s narrative throughline sometimes really does feel like the result of skipping dozens of pages at a time: Withdrawing most of the supporting cast, cutting any and all extraneous dialogue, and even nixing several of the film’s most notable action setpieces. The few original plot beats and scenes that remain are even further streamlined and recontextualized, clearly in the interests of budget and scale. What’s funny is, critics quickly took to savaging the film version of Battle: Los Angeles as “cynical, soulless, noisy video game of a movie;”[8] and yet, the actual video game outright omits a number of scenes that felt almost tailor-made to be included in the event of a video game tie-in! Make no mistake: Saber were here to do a job for hire, and they intended to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible. Which, in itself? Not necessarily a bad thing!
I wanna make it clear here nice and early that Saber shouldn’t be condemned for knowing their limitations, and for having a clear scope in mind for what is effectively a glorified “budget game” — the sort of software that’d debut direct to bargain bin in the earlier part of the 2000s. The 360’s Xbox Live Arcade marketplace did have its share of limits after all (including a 2GB maximum file size by that point in time), and Saber had no delusions of pushing their game past any of them. All Saber intended to do was deliver the bare minimum of what a first-person shooter should constitute, re-enact a small handful of the film’s most “iconic” scenes, and – perhaps most importantly to them – demonstrate the ability of their Saber3D engine to dress it all up as nicely as possible. That’s really the whole of their motivation here, if there were actually any beyond just the paycheck. Of course, even in executing this most simple of plans, there’s always still room for error.
Let’s start off by noting some of the most major story omissions from the movie, for those who care. Those who don’t? Y’all can safely skip ahead a couple paragraphs. For those still reading: The game drops the entire pre-invasion opening act, for the obvious reason that non-action scenes don’t lend themselves to a budget first-person shooter. It also means that the game doesn’t even have to waste time establishing so much as a single character, or bother setting up associated arcs and development for them. Granted, the movie itself fails to flesh out any of its myriad characters either, so I guess we’re really just dropping the pretense here. While the game’s at it though, they additionally whittle down SSgt. Nantz’s dozen-plus platoon to a far more manageable six “key” Marines; leaving just him, Ramon Rodriguez’s 2nd Lt. Martinez, Michelle Rodriguez’s TSgt. Santos, Ne-Yo’s Cpl. “Specs” Harris, Neil Brown Jr.’s Cpl. Guerrero, and Will Rothhaar’s Cpl. Imlay [serving as your player character]. What’s interesting to note is the fact that who lives and dies in the game varies wildly from the film’s tally — where Guerrero manages to avoid his on-screen death, Ne-Yo’s spectacled Marine surprisingly dies near the end of the campaign, and a pair of the film’s final survivors (Cpl. Lockett and HM2. “Doc” Adukwu) are just completely absent from the game.
The funny thing is, retaining Martinez in the game’s cast means that they could’ve actually followed one of the movie’s few detectable subplots, where the inexperienced 2nd Lt. is actually initially put in charge of the platoon; before promptly bungling his command, relinquishing control over to a reluctant Nantz, and heroically self-sacrificing. In incorporating these beats into the narrative, the game could’ve phoned in a quick and easy emotional moment — made it so that Martinez’s death could’ve actually had some minimal impact on susceptible players. Instead, the game just has Nantz leading from the word go, and doesn’t even have to bother giving Martinez so much as a single spoken line before killing him off in a completely unspectacular / borderline comedic fashion. In this way, the game’s story doesn’t even play at conveying or meaning anything, other than an entirely straightforward anti-alien military operation. For all the flak I give the movie’s total lack of meaningful plot, there’s at least the slightest attempt made to center it around Nantz overcoming his past trauma and rising to become the leader his team needs or whatever.
Another interesting note to make here is that the game moves as quickly as it can past all the scenes involving the rescue of a family of civilians; which ostensibly served as the entire initial mission / motivation for the characters in the film, and is still mentioned in the game’s succinct prologue. Ultimately, you get to see them for a single shot in a cutscene – where the family patriarch bears no resemblance to his on-screen counterpart in Michael Peña – before they disappear completely into the background, and are further “rescued” a couple cutscenes later without incident or casualty. Again, a very different turn of events from the movie; where there’s this whole subplot involving Peña’s character getting shot trying to save a Marine, dying in front of his son, being commended for his bravery, and ultimately prompting what’s intended to be the film’s most tense and dramatic scene. You know why none of this manifests in the game? Because the game’s story is completely meaningless, as I said before. That, and the developers probably didn’t wanna bother with modeling the family members or programming any sort of “escort” mission mechanics. For the best, perhaps.
Alright, that’s about as many of the changes to the story as I care enough to get into. Now, we can move on something way more interesting: How the game chooses to present its sparse number of cutscenes. See, where most movie tie-in games would either attempt to “seamlessly” blend in clips from the movie, recreate scenes within CGI FMVs, or simply play out the script and staging using in-engine animations; Battle: Los Angeles decides to go a different route. In its attempts at condensing scenes of dialogue and drama from the movie, the game cuts to 2D cartoons created in an Adobe Flash-analogue, with incredibly limited frames of animations and speech bubbles written in Comic Sans. Characters and backgrounds are “drawn” by running what looks like a ‘Trace Bitmap’ algorithm, wherein stills from the movie are converted into more cartoonish vector images, and further traced over with outlines in order to provide the illusion that they were drawn from scratch. I can’t guarantee that’s how it went down, but I’m still willing to wager on the theory that these cutscenes were all produced as hastily and cheaply as the rest of the game, and that every possible shortcut would’ve been used in the stead of having to produce graphics from scratch.
In effect, these cutscenes stick out like a sore thumb from the actual gameplay, and often wind up playing as unintentionally comedic. The limited ranges of motion and expression on characters leave them all looking completely blank in the face at all times — unable to react to anything happening around them, whether it be horrifying or joyous. Combine this with dialogue trimmed and re-written to be entirely expository, and you come away with the impression that the entire squad is made up of unfeeling, unflinching robots. A valued team member gets shot in the head while valiantly leading the group to safety? Everyone immediately turns to dully stare at each other in profile view, and promptly ignore what just happened. The platoon’s helicopter barely avoids crashing? They’re back to calmly and casually hanging their legs out the still-open door in the next shot. Ne-Yo being made to drive a bus past the rubble and remains of fallen brothers in arms? I guess his unchanging smirk is meant to indicate that he just finds the whole situation kinda funny. And I’m with Ne-Yo on this one: It’s truly amusing – somewhat refreshing, even – to see a first-person shooter give so transparently little of a shit about its own plot. Saber’s intention was clearly to get players into the action as immediately as possible, and to disrupt said action as briefly and infrequently as they were able.
Which finally brings us to the subject of said action, and how engaging it is in actual execution. Well, some of y’all might be shocked to hear this, but I suppose it’s my job to be the bearer of bad news: Nearly every aspect of the core shooter gameplay is abjectly awful. I’ll get to counting all the ways in just a minute, but let me lead with a positive first, and proclaim that the game’s sound design is actually surprisingly solid? When the game hypes up its “heart-thumping 5.1 surround sound,” they actually mean it: Shootouts are made all the more immersive and chaotic by surrounding walls of noise, which effectively [and deliberately] serve to disorient you and leave you feeling constantly pinned down. Deafening gunfire and explosions really get across the feeling of being stuck in the middle of an active war zone, and the running chorus of car alarms is unpleasant in a very particular and precise way. It might well grate on some more than it manages to impress; but speaking as someone who opts for the ‘War Tapes’ audio mixing in the Battlefield games, it totally works for me here in Battle: Los Angeles. Still, it may have been more prudent of Saber to provide some sort of alternative sound mix setting, for those who don’t appreciate feeling so completely overwhelmed.
Alright, with that light praise out of the way, let’s get to picking everything else about the game apart. For a game which clearly cribs its notes from the Modern Warfare school of first-person shooter design, the impression that you get is that Saber took away all the wrong lessons from their studies — focusing entirely on the presentation, and failing to understand any of the underlying mechanics and systems at play. Sure, Battle: Los Angeles may understand the general concept of “action set pieces” that Call of Duty centers around, but it lacks the ability to string them together in a cohesive and fluid fashion. To articulate the finer points of this sort of FPS design is a difficult task, but a necessary one in describing how Saber ultimately drops the ball. We can start by analyzing the enemies a player will be pitted against — the apparent alien menace, in all three variations you’d face over the course of the game: Grunts with arm rifles, similar grunts driving turret weapons, and ‘Alien Air Units’ serving as your impromptu boss battles. Of this shockingly small assortment – which it appears was originally meant to include at least one more variation (a commanding “officer caste”) – you’ll obviously be encountering the standard grunts the most frequently, and quickly learning to overcome their incredibly basic tactics.
There’s something like a misnomer when it comes to Call of Duty and other shooters like it: That every enemy soldier is interchangeable, and that their only meaningful differences amount to “different coats of paint.” Say what you will about the state of those franchises, but a lot of thought really does go into diversifying those galleries of grunts; between the weapons they carry, their placements within levels, behaviors within scripted events, and the ability to change tactics based on distance from a player and available cover. It’s a genuinely difficult balancing act — a foundation serving to drive players’ pace and momentum. Battle: Los Angeles, then, serves as an example of what happens when that delicate balance is not observed: Where enemies only exist to stand in place – out in the open – firing seemingly unending streams of shots, thereby stifling players looking to develop unique strategies and create exciting moments for themselves within gameplay. You’re left feeling as though there’s only ever one given solution / “intended route” through any given firefight, and it renders all the action immediately monotonous.
In effect, there’s only one way to resolve any of the combat encounters: Leveraging your regenerating health in order to dish out as much damage as you can from out of cover, before ducking back behind it until the screen fades back in from greyscale to full color. Rinse, lather, repeat until you’ve accounted for every visible baddy in the vicinity. Pushing initiative and attempting to move out from what is your intended cover (whichever objects the developers envisioned players as intuitively moving to) are quickly punished by what feel like instant death triggers — moments in which a full health reserve is immediately depleted seemingly out of nowhere, should you dare advance too quickly for the game’s liking. Add to this an overabundance of ammo – replenished between nearly every other firefight – and you’re left with no real incentive to deviate from the safest / most monotonous possible approach to combat. Again, say what you will about the state of cover shooters in general, but few are quite as inflexible as Battle: Los Angeles somehow manages to be.
This is all compounded by another confounding design decision: The grand total of three weapons comprising your available arsenal, where only one actually serves a practical role in combat. Between your M4A1 assault rifle being rendered a pea shooter (requiring half a magazine to down a single enemy) and a rocket launcher which is exclusively useful against the air units; your only real viable option is the game’s M40A1 sniper rifle, which can thankfully take down enemies with a single shot. Pay no mind to the pivotal scene in the movie where the soldiers discover that the aliens’ weak points are adjacent to where a human’s heart would be, either: A shot to the head will do you just fine, when all’s said and done. In fact, it’s hard to tell for sure if there’s anything in the way of location damage in Battle: Los Angeles; seeing as the assault rifle is about as accurate as pissing in the wind, and as the sniper rifle can seemingly score kill shots against any given appendage. As for the rocket launcher, it’s completely lacking in splash damage, to where only direct hits will harm grunts — a consequence of only being envisioned as a weapon to be used against the drone ships.
You wind up in rocket duels with the flying crafts a couple times over the course of the campaign, serving as boss battles complete with on-screen health bars establishing how seemingly impervious they are to damage. What these encounters entail is little more than a steady stream of launching rockets from your end (aided by infinite ammo replenishments), the drone dodging half your shots, before catching it charging up for its big attack and necessitating a quick one-two punch from you in order to prevent it. Mess up the timing, and you’ll be punished in turn by a barrage that’ll likely decimate you and force a restart from the very beginning of the fight. Unfortunately, it’s fairly easy to trip up; between having to constantly dodge its gatling fire all the while, cramped spaces providing dwindling cover, and a general impatience that will inevitably build in you over the course of the prolonged duels. It’s in instances like these where you really wish that your AI companions were capable of contributing anything useful in combat, like shooting rockets of their own or serving to draw some of the enemy’s fire away from you. But alas, you’re effectively a one-man army, for better and especially for worse.
I suppose I should mention that you also have a handful of frag grenades on you at any moment in time. However, with the bulk of enemies being made to emerge out of your reach or too high up to effectively lob pineapples at, they ultimately fail to serve as an effective tool in your arsenal. As a matter of fact, the game does an amazing job of scaring you off of them right off the bat: When you’re first prompted on how to use the grenades, it appears during the game’s second combat encounter, where you’re advised to toss one between a row of cars on a backed-up parkway. At the same time, the game strategically places your teammate Mottola right in the middle of that traffic; effectively guaranteeing that your grenade will detonate the car they’re taking cover behind, and leave you feeling like you’re directly responsible for their death! In actuality, the whole set piece is scripted so that Mottola dies from an unrelated / spontaneous explosion every time you play [regardless of whether or not you toss a grenade]. But the timing of the “Press [button] to throw grenades” tooltip in conjunction with how soon after Mottola perishes is nothing short of comedic perfection — a scene you’d expect to be deliberately scripted and played for laughs in a parody game. But alas, that’s too clever a gag to be intentional on Saber’s part, at least in the context of this title.
The only bit of reprieve you’ll find from the boots-on-ground combat are a pair of turret sections, where you’ll get to man some stationary M240C machine guns. These sequences are fairly dull, as turret sections in FPS games are stereotypically wont to be. The thing is, Saber only goes and utilizes them in the conversion of the film’s two most notable action scenes: The firefight on a bridge that serves as a major turning point, and the climactic final battle overlooking the alien’s command center. By relegating your role in these scenes to stationary shooting, much of the excitement and tension is completely lost — stripping you of all your mobility and agency as a player, while the rest of your automated platoon is off-screen / ostensibly knee-deep in far tougher action than you are. At the same time, you get to discover that the machine guns are a far more effective device for destroying drones than the pithy rocket launcher could ever hope to be, creating a resentment in hindsight for having had to endure those previously frustrating encounters. To be clear: Turret sequences in FPS games were already a well-established “game design faux paux” in 2011 — right up there with sewer levels and switch hunts. But Battle: Los Angeles truly brings them down to a new low, by sandbagging / sabotaging what could’ve otherwise been two of the game’s most potentially interesting set pieces.
Of course, to be able to stage more dynamic firefights between your squad and the enemy forces, that would’ve required Saber to program all sorts of unique routines and combat actions for your friendly AI. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t in the cards for the title: Your small platoon is only capable of moving to pre-designated points of cover at the start of combat, and engaging the aliens with sporadic assault rifle bursts. At the very least, they do actually appear to contribute some small amount of damage to your targets, even occasionally scoring the rare kill on their own! But imagining having to actually rely on that complementary output while facing down more substantive waves of encroaching enemies is a terrifying thought. At the end of the day, the turrets are there for you because you need them to be — because the prospect of using your conventional weapons against any more than three on-screen enemies at a time is a losing game. If Saber had caved in and made your teammates’ AI more capable, they would fear the idea of players relying on them entirely to handle combat while safely cowering behind cover. And so, the solution is simply to give you a stationary gun capable of mowing down multiple enemies per minute, so they can at least provide a small handful of instances where you’re intended to feel like you’re facing a full-on army.
There’s a grand total of one instance in which Battle: Los Angeles makes you feel like you’re working as part of a proper team: Providing sniper support to Nantz, as he rigs up a gas station to explode underneath one of the air units. And in this one all-too brief instance, the game shines at its absolute brightest — feeling like the closest the game gets to creatively recontextualizing a scene from the film, and working within its means to make you feel like a part of it. Of course, in any other military first-person shooter, this heavily scripted sequence would be relatively unspectacular, undoubtedly being sandwiched between dozens of other similarly contrived set pieces. But in a game as starved for “cinematic moments” as Battle: Los Angeles, it stands out like a lighthouse in a dense fog. It’s the moment in the game where you realize what it could have [and should have] been, if Saber had demonstrated the restraint necessary in not making player character Imlay out to be an “army of one.” The lesson from Modern Warfare being missed here is that sometimes, you’ve gotta alternate between putting players in supporting roles, in order to diversify the range of actions they’re able to perform.
Perhaps part of the problem is the fact that Battle: Los Angeles simply doesn’t have enough time in its brief campaign to sufficiently mix things up. Spanning just three levels (which mostly blend together into one, as it is), the estimated time for completion of the game seems to average at around a paltry forty-five minutes — roughly one-third the movie’s own runtime. However, in my own first playthrough, I had inadvertently managed to finish the whole kit and kaboodle in a mere thirty minutes’ time, with cutscenes and all else accounted for! Now, some of y’all may already know that I’m no proponent of judging a game’s dollar value based on how long it takes to complete it. But in this particular instance – where we’re dealing with a tie-in to a major motion picture, and aping a formula for gameplay typically employed in 4-6 hour campaigns – that $9.99 price tag on a half-hour’s playtime winds up feeling particularly egregious. It’s barely enough time for players to parse out how the game is meant to be played, let alone convey a complete narrative! But so goes it when a developer is evidently left without any contractual obligation to pad a game’s playtime out to a specific duration, and where “as quickly and cheaply as possible” is the order of the day. It’s the sort of longevity you expect / accept from early 2000s Flash advergames — not mid-range-priced downloadables from the seventh console generation.
Naturally, the game offers the most minimal amount of incentive possible for you to consider replaying the campaign: Three unlockable ‘Game Mods,’ each corresponding to completing one of the game’s three available difficulty levels. A ‘Double Physics’ modifier makes prop objects and enemy corpses fly a bit further, ‘Hollywood Mode’ gives the aliens (but not human characters) slightly bigger heads, and the ‘Tough Guys’ option seems to double enemy health — as if they weren’t all bullet sponges already. Needless to say, none of these mutators are really all that noticeable during gameplay, and don’t serve as particularly effective motivators in compelling a player to achieve them. The only other incentives on offer are some pieces of concept art and animations, which seem to appeal exclusively to weirdos like me trying to ascertain if games had any of their intended content cut. In the case of Battle: Los Angeles, I can confirm that the answer to that particular question is “probably not, save for maybe a missing additional variety of enemy.” Collecting these unlockables across Battle: Los Angeles’ three difficulty modes is a true waste of time, especially considering the fact that the game doesn’t award them to you all at once for just finishing it on ‘Hard’ mode — forcing you to dial down to the lower difficulty levels in all their comparative ease in the fruitless pursuit of thoroughness.
At a certain point, you’ve gotta ask yourself a fairly pessimistic question: What would drive a studio to develop a video game – ostensibly for the mass market – in which “gameplay” seems to rank near the very bottom of their list of priorities? How were they expecting consumers and critics to react to the end product, if not exclusively with contempt and indifference? Well, we should probably look to how the game advertises itself, and see what highlight they lead with in their list of ‘Key Features’: “Immersive first person shooter experience. AAA boxed product visuals and heart-thumping 5.1 surround sound pull you into devastatingly deep into the heart of the battle.” Awful copy editing aside, I’d argue that this innocuous bullet point is actually incredibly telling, with regards to Saber Interactive’s priorities. See, Battle: Los Angeles’ goal was never about trying to deliver a complete “AAA boxed product” experience to players: It’s all about presenting the facade of a AAA boxed product, and demonstrating how capable they were as developers in mimicking that sort of presentation — even if only on an entirely surface level. And to what end? Why, to impress potential customers on the corporate end of the business — to wow investors with minimal knowledge of the industry, and position themselves as somehow managing to produce the polished appearance of AAA games with a fraction of the budget.
Battle: Los Angeles isn’t really meant as a game to be “played,” so much as it is a game to be looked at: Something that could be given an online store page, feature some seemingly impressive screenshots, and be taken in at a passing glance. In other words, it’s about as deeply cynical a game as could possibly be conceived — a portfolio piece given an arbitrary price tag for the sake of appearances. There’s really no scenario I can envision in which Saber Interactive gave a single damn about actual purchasers and players, and wound up turning out this with them in mind. It’s somehow more comforting to believe that they never even considered the idea that folk would ever actually buy the game — that they created it with the sole purpose of bamboozling clueless suits from the major studios and publishers, and that it somehow wound up being bought by some number of consumers by unfortunate accident. Of course, that level of cluelessness isn’t actually applicable to a decade-old studio with at least a couple games under their belt already. The reality is that Saber Interactive were more than willing to separate foolish consumers from their money in the process of this play, and took the precaution of obscuring their involvement by presenting the game under that throwaway ‘Live Action Games’ label. I really do hate to accuse developers of deliberate dishonesty and malpractice like this, but it’s seriously the only explanation that makes any sort of sense as to why the game is… well, what it is.
So, with all that now in mind, let’s get to talking about Battle: Los Angeles’ all-important presentation. For whatever it may be worth, and for what dubious credit Saber are owed here: The game really does look the part of a so-called “boxed product” first-person shooter. Maybe not a particularly impressive one, and certainly nothing that holds up to even the slightest scrutiny; but removed from context and judged entirely as a series of abstract screenshots on a store page, it certainly looks like it could be a major label game! And honestly, isn’t that just describing how actual AAA games prioritize their visuals at this point? Of course, as one actually plays Battle: Los Angeles for themselves, the lustre is quickly lost and the game is revealed for what it truly is: A series of flashy distractions and scripted camera moves, meant to divert your attention away from all the rest of the unpolished bits… Which, again, is pretty much keeping in tune with the AAA games it seeks to imitate. After all: What’s a big budget game without its fair share of shortcuts and oversights?
Just so we’re clear, I’m not honestly trying to rag on either Battle: Los Angeles’ or any other contemporary games’ visuals: It takes a proper pedant to count the polygons for every incidental object in the environment, and to complain about stuff like the bump mapping on some innocuous ground texture not being “up to par.” In the case of military shooters in particular, all I’m really looking for are some decently detailed soldiers and some moderately dense urban sprawls. By this standard, Battle: Los Angeles really does do a fine job in rendering its small cast of men [and woman] in uniform, milspec gun models, and demolished city streets; paired with all the dynamic lighting, physics effects, and booming explosions you’d expect to see in this sort of game. There are some relatively detailed environments you’ll be passing through, which do a fine job of matching the set designs from the film (and by extension, the real-life streets of Los Angeles). The small handful of actor likenesses are “close enough,” if not limited in their abilities to emote and given very little in the way of close-ups. On Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the game even manages to hold at a steady 30 frames per second, while PC players with half-decent specs at the time got to enjoy it at a consistent 60 FPS.
If I were looking to nitpick, there are certainly a couple of visual elements I could highlight as having benefited from some finer-tuning. For one, the dusty brownish-yellow haze over 90% of the environments doesn’t do much for me, and certainly gets monotonous mighty quick. Yes, this “style” was pretty much par for the course for the genre at the time, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to look at. What compounds the issue in Battle: Los Angeles’ case is that the time of day never seems to change across the entire campaign — as if the events are made to unfold in real time over the course of your thirty minute mission. For reference, the film stages at least a couple scenes during darker hours of the day, which Saber decides to completely ignore in converting some of those same scenes for the game. About the only time the lighting is broken up / used to elicit a sense of mood is during an incredibly brief foray into the underground, where an inexplicable bath of blue light washes over all the scenery. It’s actually in service of the game’s most cinematic spectacle, wherein your team discovers the alien’s command center buried a mile beneath the earth. Naturally, this moment is immediately undercut by the game blowing up Ne-Yo in an easily avoidable explosion, so the impact is slightly lessened by that goofiness.
The other decision which looms heavily over the game is the inclusion of some tacky product placement — a pair of billboard ads promoting Sony’s The Green Hornet movie and the Havok physics engine. These billboards appear roughly a half-dozen times each, and your gaze is meant to lay directly on them every time; as enemies conveniently choose to stand in front of them, or as the structures come toppling down right in front of you. Unfortunately, these represent the only two billboard graphics in the game, leaving Los Angeles looking like it’s in the pockets of Sony Pictures and a middleware software company. This actually speaks to a larger issue with the presentation — its biggest issue, perhaps: Its general lack of variety. With little in the way of “personal touches” by the developers and largely interchangeable environments, your tour through war-torn California winds up being a visually monotonous affair. Which goes to show that AAA-grade assets can only be stretched so thinly, if you’re not willing or able to put the time into producing a particularly large quantity of them.
With just about every facet of the game covered at this point (turns out there’s not too much to say when there’s so little of it to go around), I reckon it’s about that time where I provide my armchair recommendations as to what the developers could’ve done better. Of course, as I do so in the case of Battle: Los Angeles, I suppose I have to bear in mind the fact that Saber Interactive weren’t exactly looking to set the world on fire to begin with — that their scope was pretty narrow from the start, and that much of what I would suggest was probably already thought of [by the studio] and deliberately disregarded. But of course, that’s hardly an excuse for several of the game’s more egregious errors and cost-cutting measures. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is creating a more substantive campaign: Incorporating more scenes from the movie, inventing a few more original firefights, and generally aiming to extend the playtime to at least the two hour mark. As it stands, thirty minutes is just far too short a length for a movie tie-in FPS, given the additional lack of replayability.
In the process of expanding the campaign, there’d be plenty of room to improve on the variety of things to do within that added time. A wider range of objectives would certainly be appreciated, where the movie already serves as a fine template; between protecting your civilian charges, planting C4 in preparation for advancing aliens, leading air units away from your squad, night time combat, and even the excuse to incorporate some moving vehicle segments (between the helicopters, humvees, and hotwired bus). At the very least, some more of those sniper sections could’ve been implemented, along with some longer stretches of city streets and roomier interiors to navigate. Populate them with at least one or two more varieties of enemy, maybe sneak in a couple of simple stealth sections (at a minimum, the ability to take enemies by surprise), and for Pete’s sake; give players at least a few more guns to play around with — a shotgun for close encounters, light machine gun for suppressing fire, pistol for finishing off enemies when your primary runs dry. These all make for fairly standard features in an FPS, all told.
In lieu of extending the campaign, Saber could’ve at least gone and implemented some different gameplay modes instead: Wave survival, time attacks with leaderboard support, and maybe even some online multiplayer featuring teams of Marines versus aliens? While that latter option would certainly require a more significant time investment on Saber’s end, and run the very high risk of being dead on arrival; it’d have certainly made for a nice feather in their cap, and shown investors how far they’d go in the service of extending the longevity of a promotional product. And for what it’s worth, there’s actually the chance it could’ve appealed to a pretty significant demographic: XBLA and PSN players looking for a compact dose of team deathmatch action on the cheap, as an alternative to dropping a full $60 on the latest Call of Duty or what have you. You’d be surprised just how far that sort of minimal-effort offering has taken some low-budget / free-to-play shooters across digital storefronts.
But again, I must reiterate: It’s likely that Saber had no such ambitions to do anything beyond what they ultimately delivered. While I can only speculate as to what sort of grander purpose the game was meant to serve, or what sort of point they were trying to illustrate by developing it the way they did, the one thing that can be said for certain is that Saber had no particular passion for this project. When you take on the task of a movie tie-in game, you do so for one of two reasons: An undying love for the property attached, or for the purpose of a quick paycheck. Seeing as Battle: Los Angeles as a film failed to inspire much in the way of passion from anyone, that really just leaves us with the paycheck choice. Still, that’s not necessarily an absolvement for Saber completely half-assing the whole endeavor, and sticking a slightly shameful price tag on it. While I certainly don’t mind seeing Sony’s money go to waste, I do feel a bit bad for anyone who might’ve paid to purchase Battle: Los Angeles; either expecting a fully-realized film adaptation, or something akin to the sort of AAA experience it takes such pride in dressing itself up as. If we’re looking for some sort of silver lining, I suppose the fact that the game’s negative reception seems to overshadow folks’ memories of the film is a pretty amusing turn of events! Whatever does damage to the Sony Pictures brand can’t be all bad, in my books.
In the context of this game: I define “key” characters as those who are actually [vaguely] modelled after their original actors, given lines of dialogue, or who are otherwise kept around for longer than one level.
The middleware used to display these cutscenes (as well as all the UI elements) in-game is ‘ScaleForm GFx’ — a tool which is used to incorporate graphics and animations created in Adobe Flash into a given game. It takes Flash’s ‘SWF’ file format and converts it into ‘GFX’ files in order to render them within a given renderer / provide a layer of obfuscation within the game’s data directories. Theoretically, it should be possible to decompile and view the contents of these files outside of the game (using either Flash or the Scaleform SDK), but I could not for the life of me manage to get anything working on my end. What’s especially frustrating is the fact that a “credits.gfx” file exists – possibly containing the [otherwise hidden] names of the developers who contributed to the game – but that I cannot find any way to crack it open and parse its contents.
When it comes to explosive weapons in games, there’s an expectation that the resulting explosions themselves should be able to do some amount of damage to adjacent enemies, even if your projectile isn’t a direct hit. In example: When firing off a rocket in Quake III: Arena, it’s actually pretty rare that you’ll be able to actually catch another player with a direct hit, where you’re far more likely to damage them by deliberately detonating against the walls or floors adjacent to your target and catching them in the blast radius. In Battle: Los Angeles however, the developers seemingly never accounted for players attempting to use rocket launchers against the game’s grunts — intending rocket launchers to be used exclusively during the heavily-scripted drone encounters. As such, the explosions are just a graphical effect, and only direct hits are left to register as dealing damage.
“They’re Dead. I’m Here. Like the Punchline to Some Bad Joke.”
At the same time as film critics were happily tearing the movie to shreds, games critics similarly fell upon Battle: Los Angeles’ software tie-in. The most common refrain became the game’s brief length, as reviewers found themselves flabbergasted by just how little content was being put on offer for $9.99. Brett Todd for GameSpot went so far as to take the game’s abrupt ending as a personal affront: “[There are] no extra frills of any sort to hold your interest a moment longer than it takes to finish the campaign and reach a ‘Thanks for Playing’ message that comes off more like an ‘LOL Thanks for Giving Us Your Money’ parting shot. […] As a free promo for a movie, this would be a worthwhile download to fool around with for an hour or so. As a game costing $10, though, this XBLA title is a flat-out rip-off.” Vladimir “Nomad” Goryachev for Russian games site ‘AG’ (a territory in which the game / movie was retitled as ‘Alien Invasion: Battle of Los Angeles’) similarly took offense to the game’s anti-climax: “When I finished the confrontation with the invaders at the command center, I still believed that the retelling of the film was a prelude to the real struggle for the liberation of Los Angeles. Oh, how wrong I was.“ Later in their 22%-scoring review, they provide what might well be the most damning summation of Battle: Los Angeles I could find:
“1.5 GB of data. 10 dollars. 45 minutes of gameplay. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new winner for the title of the shortest commercially available first-person shooter. […] Only a person without conscience and soul would be willing to sell such a product, but the synergy is beautiful: You’ve seen the bad movie – now play a crappy game.” ~ Vladimir Goryachev, AG
One of the few rare “”positive”” reviews I came across is provided courtesy of IGN’s Kristine Steimer; who used their platform to score the game as a 5.5 (out of 10), and proceeded to sell readers on the game on the merit of being “so bad, it’s good”: “If this game had been handled the traditional movie-tie-in way, as a retail-priced six- to seven-hour adventure, I’m not sure it would have worked. I managed to have a good time with Battle: L.A., but not because it’s a good game. […] Everything about Battle: Los Angeles is either average or awful, but that’s part of its charm. The cut scenes, which are essentially still comic panels with word bubbles, are unintentionally humorous.” Truly, a game reviewer after my own heart! They conclude with a final appeal to those who appreciate the less-finer things in life: “The game lacks variety, but it also doesn’t outstay its welcome. If you want some laughs and don’t mind that the shooting experience is average at best, playing through this alien invasion is probably more entertaining than the movie and you’ll get some Achievements/Trophies out of it.”
For whatever the likes of Kristine’s heartfelt plea may have been worth, Battle: Los Angeles proved something of a middling seller across digital marketplaces. Actually, considering how little was clearly invested in developing the game, the numbers may well have proven it decently profitable! What we have for reference are sales figures from its XBLA release, accounting for its time on the marketplace over the course of 2011. Here, it is revealed that the game sold through 43,622 digital copies between March and June, with a further 16,454 being added to the count in the second half of the year.[12] That accounts for a total of roughly 60,000 owners of the game on Xbox 360. If you figure sales on PS3’s PlayStation Network as likely landing somewhere in the same neighborhood, and generously account for maybe as much as 10~20,000 sales on Steam, you can ballpark the game as having possibly managed – very charitably – somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 copies sold? At the very least, I imagine it as having cleared the 100,000 copies milestone, and probably having satisfied whatever internal expectations Konami, Sony, and Saber all had for it.
Inversion on PC (Namco Bandai / Saber Interactive, 2012)
Battle: Los Angeles came and went without much incident, truth be told. It certainly didn’t represent a major investment by any involved parties, likely made said money back, and disappeared from the public consciousness shortly thereafter — all precisely as it was designed to do, as a short-term promotional tie-in to a motion picture’s theater run. Unexciting as that outcome may well be, this isn’t a story about a financial flop that set back the company responsible, or a stinker sullying a studio’s long-standing reputation: This is the story of a developer knowingly churning out a half-baked product, and getting away with it scot-free. Saber Interactive knew their futures were already secured thanks to Halo, placed their true ambitions behind their upcoming title Inversion, and only took on a contract gig in order to further bolster their coffers; deciding to phone Battle: Los Angeles in as quickly and cheaply as possible, knowing full well that critical and consumer reception would ultimately be immaterial. And as the next several years would prove to Saber, this would be a tactic they could repeat again and again, with nearly nothing in the way of consequence for doing so.
Inversion would ultimately release to a lukewarm reception; where despite boasting some novel mechanics in the way of gravity manipulation, its short length and otherwise derivative third-person shooter gameplay squander its larger potential. It’s at this point that Saber became a machine largely dedicated to supporting Halo: The Master Chief Collection, with developing further original IPs being put on hold… save for one final release in 2013, titled GodMode. Released under yet another one-time use studio label (‘Old School Games’), it was meant to serve the role of a co-operative multiplayer shooter, with elements of Greek mythology as its theming. Unfortunately for Saber, folk weren’t particularly intrigued by it, and it was left to languish saleswise. And so, when Universal Pictures came knocking at their door with a proposition to develop a new movie tie-in game, Saber leapt at the opportunity to put in the most minimal amount of work possible: 2013’s R.I.P.D. The Game is no less than a literal reskin of GodMode, featuring identical gameplay across a range of recycled levels — actually cutting some content in the process, where it came to elements they couldn’t quite as easily re-paint and repurpose. When additionally considering the fact that R.I.P.D. released within just three months of GodMode, Saber’s cynicism and discrediting of their audience comes that much clearer into focus.
From that point forward, Saber Interactive seemed to transition into a full-on “phone it in” mentality: Between their work on The Master Chief Collection and further involvement in remastering entries in the Crysis franchise – as well as their involvement with the largely-maligned Quake: Champions – Saber have been content to take on all manner of assorted licensed work — dealing in properties with no major expectations of quality placed on them. Did you know that the Bass Pro Shops company has its own series of games? Saber Interactive were helmed with developing a 2018 entry titled Bass Pro Shops: The Strike – Championship Edition, as well as an entry in the Cabela’s The Hunt series that very same year. They’ve been running the Spintires series of off-road vehicle simulators since 2017, after original publisher Oovee games screwed over the game’s creator (Pavel Zagrebelnyj) and got themselves tangled up in a messy lawsuit — one which Saber have since found themselves involved in as well. Oh, and remember that awful idea to “redeem” / reboot Shaq Fu with 2018’s Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, as developed by an unknown developer in ‘Big Deez Productions?’ Would you be shocked to hear that’s yet another disposable label established by Saber Interactive, in order to hide their involvement in a known trainwreck yet again?
All said and done, and having really examined the state of Saber Interactive’s operations over the course of researching this article, I’m coming away from this experience pretty well pissed at the company. Where I once placed Battle: Los Angeles on my list of “The Best Worst Games of [Last] Decade,” it feels a lot harder to take any sort of pleasure in playing it now — ironic, cathartic, or otherwise. Saber have surely gone and guaranteed themselves some further coverage on this website, with my now knowing the absolutely shameless state of their modus operandi. I genuinely hate to have to take developers to task quite this harshly (I should hope my history of writing on the Bad Game Hall of Fame is testament to that), but it’s not every day you run into a studio so flagrantly apathetic as Saber have gone and proven themselves to be — as uncaring as they are about dropping lacklustre products into paying players’ hands. At the very least, we now have a potentially effective line of defense against potential real-life alien invaders: Convince them to join forces with Saber Interactive, and watch as production on their war machines slips into complete disarray and a total lack of quality control.
♫ “Los Angeles” by Frank Black. (🔊)
Another good article about movie-tie-in shovelware (trash videogames), gotta say that I missed them.