Heavy Weapon Review (PS3)

Popcap games are one of a handful of developers who have successfully made the transition from producing lunchtime / coffee break casual games for your browser, to bringing those games to your home console. If you’ve never heard of them, you’ve probably never heard of one of the greatest and most addictive casual games this generation – the sublime Peggle. A simple idea, drop balls to destroy bricks and unlock bonuses. Peggle is a work of art, and with the game now available across several different platforms, it’s your duty to track it down and play it if you haven’t done so.

This isn’t a review of Peggle though and really the only reason I mention it is because Popcap really are still that same casual-game-producing company they’ve always been. Case in point – Heavy Weapon, a new release for the Playstation 3 via the PSN store.

Here you have a game you’d probably be quite happy to waste a few idle moments on while at work but does it make the jump from browser to console successfully? And have Popcap put a lot of extra work in to make sure it uses your machine’s capabilities properly, improving this now 4 year old game and bringing it up to scratch?

In a word, no. Heavy Weapon is pretty dreadful – stripping basic shoot ‘em up gameplay back till you can see its wasted underfed skeleton underneath. You control a death-dealing mega-tank. Pitted against the might of the Red Army, your tank faces wave after wave of enemy planes, jeeps and mega bosses.

Tanks for nothing

Looking a lot like a side-scrolling Moon Alert, don’t get too excited because within 15 minutes of gameplay you’ll pretty much see everything the game has to offer. Movement left and right can help your tank avoid incoming planes and bombs, and the more you destroy the more powerup tokens you can grab to improve your weaponry. Multi-directional fire from your pivoting main gun is complimented by other super-weapons you purchase between each level.

Some weapons succeed in allowing you to wipe your enemies out with ever-increasing ease. Others (like the lasers and the flak cannons) don’t really seem to do a heck of a lot.

At the end of each level you’ll face one of the Red Army’s superweapons. Giant bosses that pummel you with homing missiles, gunfire and even in one case a giant wrecking ball.

So far you’re probably thinking “What’s he on about? This sounds OK!” but it’s not, it’s like someone’s first year game degree project both in execution and presentation. The graphics look exactly like they’ve been drawn in Macromedia Flash (ironic, because that’s probably what the original browser game was written in!). Terrible artwork on everything (except oddly, your main tank) can’t cover the cracks in the gameplay or the dull repetitive nature of the game. It’s so easy to start with that it practically plays itself, making it like watching digital paint dry. Then the developers obviously realised they’d made it all a bit easy, so they introduce the Mount Everest of steep difficulty curves midway through the game, introducing nukes that cannot be avoided and must be shot down before they hit the ground. You can cope with the first wave, but after a while they’re practically unavoidable which just adds to your frustration and has you reaching for the “quit to XMB” button.

Giant Bomb

Trophies are awarded for skilful gameplay but even this is a poor incentive to carry on playing. Heavy Weapon might appeal to younger players (but do you really want your young kids playing something where they shoot down thousands of planes in a tooled up tank?) but for anyone who’s used to relatively good quality PSN Arcade titles, it’d be money down the drain. You can complete the game in less than a couple of hours and even though there are online modes, there’s virtually no incentive to replay the game once you’ve liberated all of the (amusingly named) territories invaded by the reds.

Most insulting of all is that you can grab the PC version of this game for free, yet the PSN version costs actual real money (no price has been confirmed for the European PSN store yet but anything over a couple of quid would be a joke). Keep your money in your virtual wallet, there are far better games on offer on the store and it’s a bit cheeky of Popcap to bother releasing this game this late in the day on a platform that really doesn’t need it.

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Our rating

1/10