Before I begin this, I’d like to be totally honest and open about one thing. I, personally, like naval combat, especially “classic” WWII combat such as World of Warships. I’m not an expert on any of it, guns, ships, major battles, just general knowledge across the board. I can compare real life situations/ships/guns/etc. to this game but of course I won’t because obviously: IT’S A GAME. So if you’re looking for a “comparing to real life” review here, move on. This is strictly a game review.
Because of said love of naval combat, upon the announcement of the official release date, I decided to find out about this game. That and a friend of mind was constantly asking whether I had played it, seeing if I liked it since he knows how much I like this type of game.
From a gaming standpoint, the game is beautiful, the sounds are magnificent, game play is simple as the learning curve is not too severe expect maybe a bit more learning to do when commanding carriers and you do get the general sense that you are in command of a ship.
The guns…OH the beautiful, beautiful sounding guns. I am audiophile so I truly do appreciate good audio effects, Battlefield 3 and 4 being one of my favorites for sound design, and this game does capture the power of your ships guns, even on a small and quick destroyer they sound like real guns and not just placeholder/library sounds. Being near an allied ship that fires gives you the very nice reverb and echo effects you’d expect in real life. The softer sounds, waves crashing on the bow, the engine rumbling away in the background, those are are just as decent and when you’re traveling towards a fight and hearing nothing but those soft sounds (plus distant fighting) makes you feel a bit like you’re there.
One downside, there is a “god like” announcer that personally annoys me. There are voices of your crew that let you know things like your ship is on fire or your engine is out, etc. and they’re a bit quiet, can be drowned out by gunfire and such but this announcer, which drowns out all voices and sounds, to let you know your team is winning, loosing, you sunk a ship, etc. that is SO loud and annoying that there really needs to have a toggle or separate volume bar for him. There is a voice volume bar but that includes your crew, which I personally like to hear them. And when you’re in the middle of a tense fight hoping to get a critical hit on the enemy, your muscles tense, your eyes unblinking, nearly holding your breath hoping to survive, to hear this omnipotent voice shout “OUR TEAM IS ABOUT TO WIN!” On more than one occasion I’ve jumped in my seat to that voice because when you’re in a fight, you’re not exactly looking at how much health you have left and when you die, it explodes loudly, you start feeling like anything loud is your death. But honestly that’s just nitpicking.
The graphics, as I said before, are extremely pretty. They did truly capture the accuracy of the ships. One downside, as of now, is there is no weather effects of any kind incorporated into the game. So no rain, thunderstorms, waves, but they have said they will add that later down the line which I look forward to trying out. The game itself, after downloading about 6GBs, unpacks to 21GBs which is surprising to me so if you were hoping for a small game, take note of that.
Game play is simple and doesn’t change drastically depending on the type of ship you captain. For the not so naval inclined:
Destroyers are small and fast, with weak guns but a bunch of torpedoes that can take down anything with just a couple into the side of the enemy. You get a major speed boost and smoke generator to mask you and you’re allies so you can attack and run or mask allied battleships coming up to support you.
Cruisers are the meat the game. Tough, good guns, some have torpedo launchers, good anti air, depending on the ship some can be as fast as destroyers. The first ship you get is a cruiser, you learn the basics of the game this way.
Battleships are, of course, everyone’s aim to get. The monster of the sea with lots of health, lots of big guns, and lots of range, but very slow, very slow reloading, very slow turning and very slow traversing of your guns. You have to plan your tactics in advance simply because you may or may not be ramming a friendly while you focus on an enemy 13kms away or you might be surprised by an enemy who appears on your port side while all your guns are pointing starboard. PLAN, PLAN, PLAN with this ship.
Aircraft carriers are the specialty of the game. They don’t directly engage other ships, they do have anti air guns. You will spend most of your time telling your aircraft from a tactical map view to fly and attack other planes and ships but you do not have direct control of them. You simply give them a command and they figure it out to the best of there ability. Torpedo and dive bombers can be directed in what direction to attack a ship and you can zoom in to see how well they do it. But once you run out of planes, the carrier is nothing more than a cruise ship waiting for to be sunk and nothing to do but wait for the match to end or leave the game.
Small passive pluses include commanders, camouflage, signals, and semi-permanent upgrades. Commanders, once unlocked, can add bonuses to any ship assigned to you, such as faster reloading, tougher aircraft, better detection of the enemy, etc. Commanders earn there own XP to unlock more bonuses and can be transferred to other ships. Camouflage can be applied to ships to give them a bonus, one is having the enemy accuracy be 4% less accurate while another has 3% less detectability by the enemy. Signals are unlocked by achievements which you earn in game, such as first blood or killing a ship after you’ve been killed. These signals are flags which hang off your masts and give personal bonuses. One signal makes it 100% chance of not detonating your magazine while another is 20% more credits earned, another is 50% more XP. Keep in mind, camouflage and signals are consumables, after each battle they must be bought again and while camouflage is unlimited, you only get so many signals from achievements. Some signals give you a pack of 10 per achievement while others will only be 1 signal.
The semi-permanent upgrade is a per ship basis. You buy the upgrade which could make your anti air guns not be disabled/destroyed so easily in combat or your engines be repaired faster. You can only buy one upgrade per side (guns side and engine side.) Once applied to your ship, you can’t apply any other upgrade to that side unless you take it off, which can only be done two ways. The first way is to destroy it which is free but since the upgrade is quite expensive it’ll be wasteful to do that a lot and the other way requires that you spend premium currency to remove it.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’ve never played World of Tanks or World of Warplanes, but if you liked those and are expecting the same, well you got it I’m sure. Fire more, do more damage then the enemy and you win. And just like any Free-to-Play title, it gets harder the higher up (lower down the tree, in this games case) the tech tree you go. I only managed to unlock the first carrier with a double XP weekend with an added 1 day premium special with my account. After that was all over it seemed that all my effort I was putting in before was amounting to very little to get an upgrade or another ship. So if you have a specific ship in mind you want, unless it’s from WWI, prepare for a hard grind or buy premium.
Lower down in the tiers, the community seems nice. People try to help people out, as they’re newbies, trying to figure out the game. But of course once you get a bit higher, those helpful people seem to disappear and it drastically turns into a capitalized text shouting matches (as there is no VOIP) about how much you suck, how your mother is extremely promiscuous, and how much they hope you and your ship are killed as soon as possible.
The higher up seems to be more of a “you should know what you need to do, I don’t need/want to tell you and when you screw up, I shall yell at you a lot and blame you for not helping me even though I did not directly ask for your help.” Personally I hate this part of any game, if you need/want help, ask for it. Don’t blame other people for you failing. So prepare to read a lot of anger messages in chat since you can’t hide the chat box.
As previously mentioned, the game being F2P, makes it a grind. But there are a few premium ships you can buy right now which will obviously expand as time goes on. There are only two full navies available, US and Japan, with the USSR currently only have two ships which can only be bought with premium currency. A personal favorite ship of mine on the US side, the Atlanta Class cruiser, is premium only and can be bought for 9000 doubloons, which is about $45 (USD.) To me that seems EXTREMELY costly for just one ship but that ship also comes with its own slot, called a port, for your ship, earns more free XP which can be shared with all other ships, and commanders transferred control with no re-training needed.
The game doesn’t seem entirely optimized. Even on a powerful system it seems to struggle sometimes to load quickly. Sometimes it will load almost instantly and be waiting on the countdown to start, other times it seems to load quickly but won’t put me into the actually game and other times it will take a long time to load and when I finally do get into the game the other players have already traveled a good kilometer or two away from there starting points.
The game is good, it’s fun. If you’re looking for another War Gaming game but this time on water, you have the right game. The ships feel good, game play is as well, higher up ships will be harder to get with a grind but premium, like all F2P games, offers an incentive. Whether that incentive is worth buying or not is up to you. The community seems decent, seems a bit more on the angry yelling/complaining/call you a noob type the higher up you go. And no, just for the record, only a select few times that anger was directed towards me for whatever reason but even when it wasn’t, there seemed to be a lot of people complaining about others. It was very tiring over days.
Like any F2P game, if you’re even slightly interested, give it a try, see if you like it. A review can only tell you so much. The only downside is lost hard drive space which can be reclaimed or for those of you with data caps, a loss of 6-8GB or so, which is actually not that bad. But again, it’s up to you.
I am honestly not a huge fan of this game. Like I said I love naval combat but somehow this game just doesn’t cut it for me. It’s fun to play but it’s one of those games that either you’re doing very well and want to keep playing cause you’re doing good, then another time quickly after you spawn you’re dead and you feel like you did nothing. And the quickly dying part seems to happen more often than not.
Either you play aggressively and get killed quickly cause you charged towards the enemy as fast as possible and every ship targets you or you play conservatively, get yelled at by your teammates for not helping then die anyway cause it just took the enemy team longer to get to you to kill you. If you try and stay with you’re team, you either get cramped in close quarters (close for ships that is) cause you and your team are trying to weave through islands, an ally blocks your shots (causing you to damage them), an allied ship launches torpedoes into you, (most likely killing you or very nearly) all while the enemy rains shells down on you.
It has its moments, not completely fleshed out yet. Here’s hoping it gets better with time.
