Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

What is it?

Battle for the White House is a mobile game from Gameloft. It’s a collection of mini-games featuring the cast of candidates for the democratic and republican nominations for the 2008 US presidency election. Many of the candidates featured, such as Fred Thompson, have already withdrawn from the race, but since you can choose any candidate you like from the lineup to play as, it doesn’t become so much of an issue. What’s important is that all of the candidates who are still in the race are in the game, which would require a bit of luck on Gameloft’s part. However, John McCain is nowhere to be found.

How does it play?

The main play in the game is within the Campaign Mode, which follows the candidate of your choice through some absurd games in different regions of the country. You’ll see, for the most part, the same games in each region. There are only a handful of games in the collection, and the difficulty level varies within each region, changing things up a little as you progress through campaign mode.

The controls are detailed before each game on the load screen, and they’re kept as simple as possible, which is a blessing. In the ballot ball stage, where you run on a large ball and try to mow down voters on your way to deliver some ballots while avoiding trees, you only need to worry about left and right, which makes it a fun diversion. In boxing, a more complex game, you have dodging and jab options in addition to straight punches and the like.

The parade game, which is a lot like a rhythm game, has you pressing directions in sequences in order to appeal to passing voters. A dancing minigame called “meeting” is a much more focused version of this, where you see directions scrolling across the screen from various directions and try to match them. The Crowd Breaker, which really surprised me, has you knocking baseballs into anti-fur activists who’ve gotten between you and your limousine in a kind of wacky take on Breakout or Arkanoid.

How does it look and sound?

This is a casual game, and a minigame collection, so naturally it wasn’t designed to knock the user over with its presentation. However, the characters are amusing caricatures with a lot of detail, particularly when represented large on the screen, as in the boxing and meeting games. The faces are expressive and the graphics are colorful and everything is very clear, which is by far the most important thing to look for in a game on a screen this small.

The sound is forgettable but not annoying (you’ll hear “hail to the chief” a lot), and you have the option of playing without it every time the game is loaded.

How is the replay value?

The individual games are unlocked one at a time as you progress through the campaign for play in Survival and Free Play modes. It’s not clear how much fun it would be to spend lots of time on any one game. You might not think so, but punching Hillary Clinton in the face gets old after a few minutes. OK, maybe that’s a bad example. Some of the games, like the Pac-Man clone where you run around the White House Rose Garden picking up ballots and dodging the Secret Service, are games you’ll never want to see again after the first time through.

Is it worth it?

It’s a lot of fun to see these very public figures get taken down a peg, and the whole election process reduced (some would say elevated) to fisticuffs. The game doesn’t take sides, as every candidate gets the same experience as you pass through the game. Still, the game is not going to have a great deal of appeal once the matter is settled in real life. It’s an interesting gamble Gameloft’s taken with the theme, one perhaps even more shortsighted than Cr√ºeball. Perhaps not.

I give Battle for the White House three out of five.

Check out Battle for the White House and Gameloft’s other mobile games at the official site.