Battle Unit Zeoth (Game Boy)
When Battle Unit Zeoth was being ported from its home country of Japan to the West, the developers were considering renaming it to avoid it being stigmatized as something too foreign. The name they considered changing it to was the rather generic title Jetpack, and while it isn’t a name that is particularly exciting, it is perhaps the more fitting title for the game, not because Battle Unit Zeoth is a bad name, but because it is too interesting a title for the game.
Battle Unit Zeoth does not even really try to establish the context of its experience much in-game. You simply find yourself in the titular Battle Unit without any real explanation of what it is or even why it is deploying, the game almost intentionally avoiding story where it can and your foes only really referred to once with just the word “enemy”. The manual is usually where more story can be found, but even here, the details are rather simple and the two paragraphs devoted to it spend some of their time needlessly mentioning locations. All there really is to it is a group of metallic alien beings called the Grein attacked Earth once and managed to build an underground base during the assault so that many years later they could try the attack again.
Battle Unit Zeoth is thus a game where only the gameplay is really given any attention, but even then there are some oddities. Battle Unit Zeoth only features five short stages and gives the player infinite continues, meaning that it won’t take long to complete the game. High score is the main thing to shoot for seemingly, with your score resetting after you hit the Game Over screen to encourage some self-preservation since you’d otherwise just get kicked back to the start of a level penalty free for dying.
Game length is definitely all about how that time is spent though, but even when you factor in how you play, the game still finds itself a bit lacking. The machine the game is named after though is actually a pretty decent mechanical suit to start with. The Battle Unit Zeoth packs a weak but decent enough default weapon in the form of its vulcan cannons, the player firing them by holding down the B button. It fires rapidly enough that even enemies who can survive a shot will usually go down to the barrage of bullets coming at them. If you try to rapid fire by pressing the B button though, you’ll instead see that the Battle Unit packs a bomb ability that damages enemies on screen at the cost of some of your health, although this ability has rather limited usefulness considering it comes at the cost of spending two units of your shield meter that only goes up to eight total. Besides, your basic shots quickly become more than capable of handling most things your bombs would possibly be needed for, as you can pick up different power ups to make your gun fire more shots or take on new traits.
Pick up the letter B and your shots are now more powerful beams, although they still have pretty typical bullet shapes. Pick up an L, and now you’re firing lasers instead. The P will power-up whichever of the two you have currently equipped, adding an additional shot to them so you can be firing up to three blasts at once on top of being able to launch them pretty quickly. It’s quite easy to become extremely powerful early on and maintain that power for quite a bit, the bullet spreads pretty much able to cover the entire screen in whatever direction you’re facing. There are enemies made to take a few shots from even the strongest weapon, but only the bosses really have the fortitude to stick around for a while. You will need to dodge their shots or learn where to be to ensure you don’t die fighting them, and the limited health bar actually helps mitigate the potential for the player just breezing through the game first try. You can heal by picking up the rare U letter or Ps once you’ve got full power-ups, but for the most part you’ll need to be cautious about health loss, enemies able to come from pretty much any side of the screen save moving through solid ground. If you do die you’ll be reset to the default vulcan cannon, and since the game is designed to be possible with just the vulcan cannon, it’s not too hard to get back in the action without feeling like you’ve been reduced to something too weak to enjoy. At the same time, this allowance is likely why so many enemies can be trounced so simply with a weapon that’s even only a bit stronger than the default, so it’s certainly a double edged sort of design.
Despite being mostly designed like a shoot ’em up though, Battle Unit Zeoth actually has a few similarities to a sidescrolling platformer, and that all comes down to how you move the Battle Unit about. Without input, the Battle Unit will fall to the ground, but by holding A, you can make the machine fly upwards, the player even able to tap it repeatedly if they want it to hover around a certain area. To try and encourage some active flying the game will place tougher enemies near the ground or have foes who come in from the sides of the screen to encourage moving away from them, but there is one oddity to the flight design that makes levels feel a bit emptier than they truly are. In 3 of the game’s 5 stages, you’ll be moving forward automatically even when you’re not flying, but if you do choose to take to the air, you’ll see the range of vertical movement gives you an area about two screens tall to move in. While this means the game can add more enemies and a touch more variety to the way it designs them, with things like enemies who follow you as you move around or ones designed specifically to deny space, it also means that many times, if you don’t want to deal with an enemy, you can just go to the other half of your movement area, flying past enemies who can’t reach you anymore. The later levels do pack things a bit more densely, but not enough to make it feel like there’s much pressure during these stages.
The only time Battle Unit Zeoth really injects some decent variety into the game are the two vertical levels. While the enemies try to be different, they are often dealt with too easy for that difference to meaningfully register with the player. Bosses may have different attack patterns or movement styles, but the fights are all essentially skirmishes with machines that only have a few attacks you can quickly learn to avoid. The vertical stages on the other hand ask you to move around different platforms, the first instance a vertical drop where you need to shoot at any enemies lurking below and the other a climb where you need to move around platforms as you fly up, shooting enemies that are waiting to ambush you as you reach them. There’s still not much to fear due to the levels being very short and your power level still usually able to handle most anything you come across, but it does add new considerations to play and encourages a different approach to movement, something the game is sorely lacking in the more traditional shoot ’em up stages.
THE VERDICT: Battle Unit Zeoth could have been a better game, but it was just a bit too generous, meaning its short experience hardly has the meat it needs to engage a player. The flight system means you can often avoid conflict if you wish, the upgraded weapons become too powerful too quickly since it doesn’t want you to feel weak with the default gun, and infinite continues means there is not much discouraging sloppy play. The vertical levels and boss battles do require small deviations from the rather simple tactics that work almost universally, but it’s not a drastic enough shift to save the experience. When it’s attempting to be accommodating it instead ends up dull, and when it gives you incredible power, the opposition isn’t interesting enough to produce a satisfying sense of strength.
And so, I give Battle Unit Zeoth for the Game Boy…
A BAD rating. The length of Battle Unit Zeoth definitely prevents its flaws from becoming annoying, but it still leaves you with an empty feeling when you can so easily overcome the challenges put before you. There’s nothing wrong with an easy game, but Battle Unit Zeoth’s weapons can make your opposition not even really register at times. Enemies go down so easily and don’t really have the means to counter your much greater power, making blasting them down without issue far less satisfying. Nothing really has the time to go beyond the basics either. Switching between blaster and laser isn’t a very meaningful choice, the vertical levels barely have the room to test you, and bosses don’t have enough to them to be memorable battles. There’s nothing really wrong with the ideas in the game like having a high and low screen for the action or the game accommodating weak weapons and strong weapons, but this game just doesn’t spend the time to engage these ideas, leaving the Battle Unit Zeoth feeling like a machine at odds with the game it’s in. Put it in a different shoot ’em up and its power level and movement style could work, but in a game where the enemies can barely stand against you at the best of times and there’s not much else to do, it makes the game feel bland no matter how strong you are.
The bottom line is, Battle Unit Zeoth really just didn’t belong on the Game Boy. The screen sizes lead to the issues with your spread shots being too effective and it probably kept its amount of stages low to suit the short innings that the handheld console encourages. There were certainly ways around this though, like password systems or smaller characters and bullets. Limiting hardware has not prevented other games from being enjoyable, but it seems like Jaleco didn’t want to put too much effort into making their vision work with the hardware it was being developed for, leading to a game whose weak gameplay means it doesn’t really have much going for it besides its mildly interesting title.