Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is Bam! Entertainment's attempt to bring the feature length film of the same name to the Game Boy Advance as a first-person shooter. Developer Crawfish (known for its laundry list of games on this platform) does an adequate job of creating a game that requires more twitch gaming and less thinking -- that's not a bad thing considering that Ecks vs. Sever is obviously geared towards action and not an intricate storyline. I'm not going out on a limb when I say that the storyline is ultimately irrelevant to the overall game-play. You don't really care why the two heroes - FBI agent Ecks or secret agent Sever -- are in the building in the first place; all you'll care about is how to get them out. The story is completely text dialogue, played out before each mission. If you care about story, you can read through it and see what happened in each level -- if not you can skip through it, read your mission objectives and go to town. As you complete each level you'll get a special code that you can use to return there and go through it again. EvS doesn't allow you to carry weapons and equipment over to new missions so if you gather a lot of weapons and ammo during your journeys you'll have to leave it at the gate and start all over again. Missions usually start out with limited armaments and no armor, so you'll want to try and find these vital game items ASAP.
EvS looks and feels a lot like Doom on the Game Boy Advance and offers the same kind of frenzied enemy attacks you'd expect along with the same types of game-play conventions like strafing, ducking, jumping, weapons selection, and object manipulation. There are a total of 24 levels to try these techniques out on, though some techniques work better than others. The 24 missions are divided to twelve each depending on which character you decide to play, though there is a bit of level crossover as some mission objectives seem to be the same no matter who you've chosen.
EvS also offers a couple of split-screen multiplayer modes (Deathmatch Bomb Kit and Assassination) for up to four players using the Game Boy Link Cable (obviously you'll need to have four link cables, four copies of EvS and four warm bodies willing to play). The multiplayer game modes are adequate enough and a good deviation from the structure of the single-player, though as we mentioned before you'll need four friends to play against.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever for the Game Boy Advance is a decent enough game for action fans looking for a game that doesn't require too much thinking, can be played in small bites and can be stored safely in their pockets. If you enjoyed Doom on this system, then there's no real reason why you wouldn't want to give this game a shot.
