Editorial Review
Dare to enter the Impact Zone… Two UFOs have crashed in the desert. Players race to recover all of the pieces of their crashed spacecraft. Once recovered, the UFO must be reconstructed and reactivated in the player’s “recovery zone.” Players take turns guessing “zones” where the seven pieces of their UFO might be hidden. Wrong guesses result in eerie, electronically generated desert sounds emanating from abandoned mines, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. FamilyFun Award winner. –Alison Golder
 | US $3.99 (0 Bid) End Date: Wednesday May-23-2012 14:20:11 PDT Buy It Now for only: US $5.99 Bid now | Buy it now | Add to watch list |
My eight-year old son liked the noises and the pieces. It takes a long time to play but the “cayotes”, “mines” and “snakes” that you can run into make it fun.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
This game is essentially battleship without the skill or fun, but with 4 flavors of “misses”. Why this won an award at familyfun.com is beyond me.
Instead of sinking ships, the theme is to find pieces of a crashed UFO in the desert. 2 players face each other, each with a playfield where they distribute several spaceship pieces, and a few hazard pieces, hidden from their opponent. They then take turns guessing location of their opponents pieces.
In battleship you get either a “hit” or a “miss”, in this game you get either a “nothing found”, a spaceship piece, or a hazard like a rattlesnake or a coyote (which causes you to lose a turn). With each object found, the player can hit a button to make the corresponding noise for the type of object disovered (4 noises in all).
“Wait a minute!”, you say, “Battleship doesn’t involve skill!”… well, compared to this game it does. You see, in Battleship, the type of search pattern used is important. Once the smallest ship is sunk (the ship that covers only 2 grid locations), a player can use a wider spacing in their search pattern to find the remaining ships more quickly. Also, younger players will be challenged in sinking a ship they have located with the smallest number of guesses. There’s also some drama in not knowing which ship you hit: “Is it the relatively worthless aircraft carrier or the all important PT boat?”. Well, in Impact Zone, all objects are exactly one grid location in size, so there is no skill at all, and no drama, you simply guess locations until you get all the pieces.
Our 9 year old kids (boy/girl twins) love Battleship, but played this game twice and immediately put it aside for other games. They quickly found this game uninteresting. This is why it only gets 1 star.
For educational value, I gave it 2 stars, because younger players may learn numbers (for grid numbers) and cooperative play.
In addition, the divider that separates players is not nearly big enough to hid the opponent’s pieces well. Nothing a little tape and two sheets of paper won’t fix, but still….
- Steven
Amazon User Rating: 1 / 5
My seven year old got this for his birthday. The game’s appearance has lots of kid appeal, and it makes four different electronic sounds that are really neat. This is one of those games where you have a board just like your opponent’s and you can’t see each other’s. You take turns guessing where the other person has hid the pieces of your spaceship. So the entire game consists of systematically guessing and then finding out if the desired piece is in that spot. It’s not very exciting. The special effects are cool, but after my seven year old played it once, he lost interest. Our four year old loves the board and the pieces and the noises it makes, and I have decided that the best use of the game is to let the younger child just use it as a plaything, since playing the game isn’t much fun.
Amazon User Rating: 2 / 5