"We are the Talon." "Who are the Talon?" "We are!"
Battle Group 2 has a good trailer. Not just because it's full of explosions and dramatic music, but because it focuses on in-game content, and shows the gameplay off directly. It even teases a thrilling 24-style counter-terror story. Unfortunately, despite being rooted in the game itself, this trailer is a little misleading.
The story, for one thing, is a throwaway. There's hardly any more to it than a few seconds of caption text, never developing any characters or setting. The variety of gameplay, too, is somewhat overblown; for example, the super-cool time-slow power it shows is an expensive powerup that can only be used very sparingly through the course of the 31-level campaign.
What does make the game interesting is its upgrade system. The main ship, as well as a sidecar-buddy ship, can be upgraded to new models and enhanced with extra ammo and armor/health; and though those latter upgrades are simple and straightforward, the different ship models are able to introduce some neat mechanical twists, in the form of unique attack methods. Some ships have auto-aiming cannon fire, and some others have deployable attack aircraft.
These fun nuances, though, are dulled by the grindy game economy. The amount of oil (upgrade currency) it takes to actually afford these upgrades is way too much, such that levels have to be replayed to make enough to power-up. And since the potential oil amounts vary dramatically from level to level, this grind is really a matter of tediously replaying the same level or two over and over again.
It's short - easily less than two hours total, even with grinding for upgrades - but that feels like an appropriate running time to wring all of the fun out of the game.
Battle Group 2 is fun for what it is, and has one or two cool design ideas, but is overall shallow and unsubstantial.
Better than: Missile Command
Not as good as: Raiden Fighters
To its credit: the production polish (in graphics and sound) is surprisingly good.
Progress: Finished the campaign, 92 stars.