Battleship & Connect 4

Thank the lord for portable games consoles. The gaming alternative for when you're travelling long haul with a friend - travel boardgames packed with dozens of little magnetic pieces just waiting to go flying all over the place - is not a happy proposition.

This double pack includes two classics that have had their share of travel versions, but we'd suggest you'd really be better off with this mobile version - just check out the stunning one star rating for Travel Battleship on Amazon.

In case you're not familiar with the games, in Connect 4 you take it in turns with an opponent to drop tokens into a grid of sorts. You have to try and make a line of four, whether horizontal, vertical or diagonal, before them.

Battleship is more complicated, but not by much. At the start of the game, you place your fleet of ships in a game grid. After that, you have to try and hit your opponent's ships by dropping bombs onto spots on a similarly-sized grid.

Although both games are relayed here with their traditional rule sets, playing just like the classic boardgames, each also has a re-worked rule set version, designed to make these old timers feel a little more like up-to-date mobile video games.

In Battleship, you get to build up a super weapon that takes out a whole area of the board. In Connect 4 there's a mode that introduces a whole range of power tokens that either destroy surrounding tokens, push them out of the way, or stop any other tokens from being dropped on top of them for a turn.

Although these alterations are quite obvious ones to pick, they enrich the games no end, side-stepping the disappointment at the transparent simplicity these real life boardgame conversions are occasionally guilty of. Both games are impressively slick too, full of smooth scrolling transitions, bold and bright sprites and animations that add a touch of class to the game.

With multiplayer and several difficulty levels that scale the difficulty of the AI, the only thing that Battleship & Connect 4 is missing is a Story mode to keep you involved without having someone else to play against. If this game packed something similar to the cleverly-structured Pirate Ship Battles, it could laugh in the face of just about all competition.

As it stands, Battleship & Connect 4 can't quite do that, but it's still a remarkably good conversion. However, because each game is a discrete entity without any greater structure to link them together, it's more suited to quickie sessions unless you've got a friend to play against.

In spite of this, Battleship & Connect 4's funky gameplay tweaks and impressively polished presentation mean it has ticked enough boxes and raised enough smiles to earn a strong recommendation.