Impressions after a week of play

[dr_danger]

After waiting for a month I have finally got my copy of the PT Boats russian version (Day of Victory edition). It came patched to v1.1. By the way, the current russian only demo that you can download is 1.1 as well with a few fixes in there.

I won't repeat other reviews by saying this is not what we expected but rather try to concentrate on critical things and positive aspects that could be developed into a decent game.

The main campaign is pretty rubbish, the missions are not historic as far as I can tell and they are not connected in any way. Furthermore the accent is certainly on the strategy part as without going into the tactical view and looking at symbolic representation of ships all the time there is pretty much zero chance of passing the majority of the missions. The tactics seems to be a mixture of luck and "who spots who first" as there is no way of giving your ships hold fire command they reveal themselves straight away and it all turns into a point fast and click fest.

While they have implemented some very good solution in the tactical map it feels very underdeveloped and buggy in a lot of ways. I think I would be a lot more happy with an involving story driven campaing (just like in good old Red Baron) even if it was completely scripted and stick to being a captain of a single PT Boat perhaps with limited command of a "wingman".

As a result I have spent most of my time in multiplayer, albeit without seeing a single server for entire week. You have about 10+ different boats to choose and there are various modes of play including against bots but the bots are other PT Boats so it all seems a bit pointless as you can't enter tactical mode or give orders to your crewmen to attack , you have to physicaly get in the seat of the gunner and by that time you are dead. Some missions are incredibly buggy, for example in one of them where I had to escort a damaged transport through the enemy territory I raced forward to meet the enemy ships and they just stood there idle ready for slaughter not even reacting to me until they could see the transport. So I was tryng different boats and figuring out if the sim is still there.

My general feeling is that it has been forcefully "dumbed down" but the sim is still under there. Two things hav dissapointed here: there is no feeling of speed whatsoever, most of the boats have top speed 40-50knots and it feels like you are in a leisure cruiser doing 2 knots. The nose of the boat never comes up, it moves far too slow and never jumps or produces any hull bash sound and if anyone has ever been on the boat at more then 20knots you will know that it's not exactly a subtle and peaceful experience. The handling of the boat is acceptable and the bug with it slowing down too quickly seems to have been fixed. Ramming into a big transport at 50knots unfortunately only gives you a slight bump without any consequences...

The gunnery is well modelled but there is no area specific damage effects, also seeing crews abandoning ships and realising they are targetable as well is a nice touch. The torpedo sight is modelled fairly and is quite acurrate.

This brings me to the sea itsef - its flat, flat as a pancake even in stormy weather, no waves whatsoever, ever, even if you choose stormy weather. I don't know what happened there during development. The shaders don't look great either, I would say sub SH3 standard (my rig is a twin 9800GX2s so everything was on max settings). There are issues with particle effectes, they seem to be disapearing at certain camera angles and generaly flicker a lot. Under sea camera looks fairly nice but nothing special.

The boat models are nicely modelled and it appears the sim commands are still there. While pressing lots of buttons one by one you can hear the click sounds as various things switch on\off. Things I have discovered: you can drop depth charges, you can order your crew to "button up" which seems to increase speed by a few km\h as well, smoke screen works a treat in terms that it does obstruct field of view for both enemy and allies however they just appear to give up when this happens instead of trying a different approach, there are a few buttons that seem to make click sounds but without any implications to anything so perhaps they used to be hooked up to something.

The good news is that the file structure is incredibly open, all the models are in .x files, plenty of .dds textures without any encoding at all and everything including physics is scripted in python. As a game developer myself I could say its very sloppy but at the same time great for modding community and perhaps could give this game a future.

It's a shame, such a rare and fascinating subject, good game engine and initial good intentions from the developers have turned into this very Pre-Alpha game prototype. I can only hope that the modders will pick it up and do it justice and the base is there.