Most naval games have you in the
Captain’s chair where you give orders and can temporarily take command of a
station. In Naval Battles Simulator that's not the case. The best
description of your role is you are the Admiral but you are stationed in the
Combat Information Center and just give orders, much like the early versions
of Harpoon and Great Naval Battles.
Upon booting up the game you are
greeted with a beautiful random drawing/painting of a ship as the
background for the main menu. From there your options are Battle,
Graphics Options, Encyclopedia, or info about the game. For
Battle there are six maps instantly available to choose from in version
0.82;almost all are 2 vs 2. The encyclopedia gives you all the basic info on
the ships and info on armament, armor, and the damage model. This is all
really useful info but Murphy’s laws of battle will take hold if you try to
develop a strategy before battle.
Naval Battles Simulator is set in World
War II like just about every other naval sim. The game itself as we said
earlier places you in the CIC and you don’t leave. The only graphics
you will see is the map with overlays containing battle damage, status, and
ship positions. At first it felt like I was playing Silent Hunter 3 from
the TDC but it isn’t that bad once used to it. The screenshot below
shows exactly what you will be seeing. The circles are an option that
depict visual range and turret range. You only have full control of the
heading and speed of your ship(s) through the Bridge tab/popup and each
ship’s heading and speed is changed individually. I found that to really
play well required a lot of switching between ships. Early on the ships are
relatively fast destroyers. Most of the battles were extremely quick,
lasting between 2040 minutes in real time and up to 2 hours in game time
using compression.
Damage leaves a little to be desired,
for now at least. If the ship is hit there is damage but no way to do
repairs. If there is flooding there is no way to pump it out. After a while
your ship won’t move or will only crawl. I have not lost a ship to flooding
but exclusively to just getting blown out of the water. While not game
ending this is a minor annoyance. Another thing about damage is that you
will get fires after being hit and these will do damage to your ship, which
is a nice feature as it adds some realism. Unfortunately the section is
almost always completely and utterly destroyed and not just damaged. There
is a damage model for each ship. The top is the upper decks middle
is interior and bottom is below the water line. Only the bottom section
will flood.
For armament the game does well in
modeling accuracy and armor piercing abilities. You have two shell types
to choose from, High Explosive and Armor piercing, both have a
finite amount of rounds available. The availability of rounds is
divided bow/stern and port/starboard, each turret pulling from its
respective ammo pool. Some ships have torpedoes as well and these will sink
a ship but they are better at causing an immense amount of flooding,
slowing the ship to a crawl. Of course things got more accurate when at
short range but this also meant the enemy was more accurate too, so you are
really forced into a tactical decision of what matters more; ammo count or
accuracy. Weather and time of day will also affect accuracy and visibility.
Clear days with calm seas and midday will yield better accuracy and optical
range than an overcast day with rough seas during dawn or dusk.
A few final things to note and things
we believe many would like to see out of the game. Difficulty seems too
easy. We have played both sides of just about every map and won every single
fight. A way to change difficulty would be nice, such as allowing the
opposing team as increase accuracy and loading speeds . We would also like
to see the ability to make a custom battle. Even if it’s just selecting
ships to square off with we feel that it would be a welcome addition. No
modding capability is present at this time, either. While not a deal
breaker for an indie game, small things like sound effects would be nice to
mod. As this game is still in development, and as of this writing version
0.82, some of these features might be added later on. Overall, Naval
Battles Simulator shows a lot of promise and we can’t wait to see how it
turns out.
