Review: BCV - Battle Construction Vehicles (PS2)

Year Released: 2003 (Europe)

Format Reviewed: Playstation 2

Also For: N/A

Developer: Artdink

Publisher: Midas Interactive

Related Games: Err...I'll have to get back to you on that one.

BCV: Battle Construction Vehicles lures you in with the cover which appears to promise hot digger on crane action (hey, whatever turns you on) but is it any good? Don’t be silly; see that Midas logo at the bottom of the cover? That’s the stamp of death, the seal of suckage and the guarantee of a crappy game. However, unlike the vast majority of obscure budget disasters that Midas vomited up onto the PS2, BCV is one of the rare few Japanese games that the publisher localised (called Kensetsu Juuki Kenka Battle: Buchigire Kongou!! in Japan – how does that even fit on the game spine?) so there’s perhaps a glimmer of hope after all.

You know you could be in for something really bad though when the Japanese styling is ruined by a bad English voice-over that fits the game like a size twelve welly fits a baby’s foot. Why do all the characters talk with a cockney accent? You’ll either hate this or smile at it (or a bit of both) but it sets the tone for what follows in any case.

Cherry blossoms + London speak?

  BCV definitely has that ‘so bad it’s good’ charm about it but the biggest problem is that it only applies to anything outside of the actual gameplay. The battles take place in fairly bland construction site arenas that contain a few interactive objects but mostly just crates or pipes that get in the way. Using diggers, cranes, bulldozers, steam rollers, forklift trucks and dump trucks, the aim is simply to smash the opponent before they smash you. Attacks are disappointingly limited to forward-facing ramming assaults and side attacks which only really work with cranes or diggers that have rotating arms. There are also chargeable ramming attacks and a guard button that summons steel girders around your vehicle for a few seconds to act as a defensive barrier.

Most of the time however, you’ll find yourself locking horns with your opponent and just pushing against them, hoping they die first. This is thanks to horrible controls that use the d-pad to employ the kind of frustrating tank-track controls that the older Resident Evil games were lumbered with. Turning circles are awful too so it takes longer to turn a digger around to face the enemy than it does for Britain’s roads to be gritted during icy weather. To be fair, construction vehicles probably wouldn’t be much more exciting to drive in real life but the controls in this game could have been better.

What would Health and Safety say about this?

 

Overall the combat is boring and feels like a chore which it really shouldn’t. It’s a perfect example of a game box that suckers you in with an exciting cover then lets you down big time like getting into a hot tub with two gorgeous models only to find that they used to be men…and still have penises.

Thank goodness then that the story mode and character dialogue is so entertaining in a brilliantly bad way. Being a Japanese game, the visual direction is a typical anime-styled affair complete with crazy facial expressions and nonsensical events. The story follows a boy who inherits a construction company and must recruit other machine operators to the business by beating them in battle (does this happen in real life I wonder?) so that he can take on rival companies. There are some crazy recruits including a girl in an impractical crop-top, a homosexual bulldozer driver and even a dog that can drive a digger. Did we mention the scene where the dog pisses all over someone’s leg? Classic.

Hard to tell what's happening here but it looked interesting enough to include.

 The madness continues with the cutscenes and between-battle dialogue which ranges from quirky to just plain nutty. Highlights include a separated gay couple where one of the men starts admitting they were carrying the other’s baby when they broke up (!) and the lead character who assumes the girl’s mysterious absences are for taking time out to pleasure herself over the thought of him. This is a 7+ rated game too! Okay younger players would never understand the dirty side of this particular innuendo but the fact that it’s there in this game of all games is mind-blowing.

The strange thing is that these story scenes actually give some incentive to slog through the uninspiring battles just so you can see what happens next. The strangeness even spills over into the actual battles with the feature of ‘super’ moves that see construction vehicles performing impossible and plain weird attacks to deal major damage. Examples include a digger arm smashing an opponent’s vehicle through the ground and straight into the molten seas of hell, road cones being used as missiles and a Poseidon-like character standing atop a steam roller and throwing a harpoon at the opponent. We’re not making this up – any of it.

 

A typical reaction to BCV.

For all the interesting stuff however, the core gameplay lets BCV down big time. Aside from the bad controls and extremely limited combat, there’s also a nasty difficulty spike later on where even smaller vehicles suddenly start dealing massive damage for no other reason than the fact that it’s getting near the end of the game. This is the kind of difficulty increase that makes zero sense and reeks of laziness. Being hindered by the controls only adds to the frustration and makes you wish that Midas games were popular enough for invincibility codes to be floating around online.

To conclude this review, it would be wrong to recommend Battle Construction Vehicles solely on the entertaining story segments (as badly as this reviewer wants to) purely for the reason that rubbish gameplay needs to be endured in order to see any of it. A wasted opportunity that could have been a real hidden gem if the battles had been able to match the genius of a dog at the controls of a digger and that’s not a statement you’ll often hear a reviewer sign off with.

+ A story mode as mad as a mad hatter...in a good way of course.  

- Bad controls.

- Battles could have been more exciting.

- English voice-overs are cringe-worthy.

- Evil difficulty spike later on.

Overall Score: 1.3/5

Darkstalker90 Says: "I didn't really know what to expect when I first played this one but I was gripped by the weird story segments and oddball characters. What a shame then that fighting with diggers and steamrollers turned out to be so clunky and disappointing. I'd recommend checking out the cutscenes online if they can be found but as a complete package, I find it tough to praise BCV".