BattleTabs: PvP Ship Battle

Battleship was one of my favorite board games growing up, was pleasantly surprised to discover this game is basically a modern/mobile game version of it with some twists to keep it interesting. Excellent idea that I’m surprised hasn’t been done before. There are some things I don’t like that. Some that I think and hope will be fixed over time with updates, others that I’m afraid won’t. There’s some performance issues on my iPhone 15 Pro Max with iOS 18. My phone gets really hot after only a match or two, my battery drains quickly, and the game starts freezing up a lot. I can only play a match or two at a time before giving my phone a break. I hope and think this will get fixed rather quickly with a patch. More variety in maps, ability types (seems pretty limited to just different shot patterns and variations of sonar/detection for now. Lot more room for creativity in this area), ships, game modes, etc would be nice, but again, something that I imagine will come later if the game is popular. What I don’t think will improve much is how expensive everything is. The “research tree” thing looked interesting until I got a closer look at it and noticed there’s nothing that exciting to unlock here. Looks like the good stuff is in the shop, and everything is extremely overpriced even by IAP standards these days. This is backwards from most competitive games with IAPs that I’ve played. Usually the research tree, which mainly requires rewards and time to unlock, would have your actually gameplay unlockables, such as new ships and the shop, which basically requires real money to be able to afford anything, would be where you find more of the cosmetic/optional purchases.

Battletabs is a wonderful game. The strategy involved in each round makes battletabs exciting. Unliked battleship, battletabs lets your play to your strengths by letting you build your our deck with unique abilities. It is also free to play with no adds or purchases required for the whole experience. I think for anyone who likes to keep one hand free while on their phone, battletabs is an amazing game that can be played anywhere, at anytime. 10/10

Why bother buying BattleShip in this day and age? BattleTabs has successfully killed BattleShips IP. Battleship is aged out but BattleTabs, the new fleets give it a new dynamic. Difficulty of opponents is widely variable, there is no matching done. Total random match ups. I don’t mind that considering this was born as a result of a .io game. The expansions are massive and I’ll definitely be back for more. Probably not a good idea to stream live, put a 2-3 minute delay on your stream or longer because I think I got a stream sniper on my stream today. It’s extremely fast paced and if someone knows where your ships are they can end a round in 5 turns if their boosters are set correctly. Something I can easily invite some friends to play as well as a friends list and selected multiplayer is implemented. For a game that’s 2 weeks into general launch I am impressed at what has been developed and will be keeping an eye on further developments.