Free-to-play games do have a cost. It is not measured in dollars or cents, but rather in hours and minutes of your life that you will never ever get back. If the game is fun, sometimes this can still be a profitable trade. Other times, it is pure robbery.

I got this game in the current free-to-play era and didn't bother looking at the other reviews from people who had experienced firsthand the baffling decisions made by the devs and the overall frustrating experience. I went in with no expectations or preconceptions--after all, the game's free, right?

I'd like to give a description of the experience for new players, and I'd like to further preface this account by saying that I enjoy difficult and obtuse games in general. A game having a steep difficulty curve or an impenetrable UI or nonexistent tutorials is not a deal breaker for me, and indeed many of my favorite games follow this mold.

When you start the game, you will pick a faction and be given a free brig. As you will probably have absolutely no idea what to do next, you might play the game's 4 tutorials. These tutorials are competently done and explain the mechanics of combat in reasonable detail. After finishing them, I felt confident that I could handle my small vessel and start making my way in the world.

The first thing I did was pick one of the five non-combat missions available to me in my home port to try to make a little money. There are only two varieties of these missions, and they are both essentially the same: deliver cargo or transport people (who are classified as cargo) to some other port. The starting brig is too small to hold any of the cargo, so personnel transport is the only possibility. I sailed for nearly ten minutes in real time to the destination port (which was not far away on the world map). When I was a few hundred meters away from the port, an enemy player in a huge ship-of-the-line attacked my tiny brig and sunk it instantly with a single volley. Oh well, it's a PvP game; it is what it is, right?

I started back at my home port with a new free brig. I took the only other passenger transport mission available to me and sailed for another 20 minutes to the destination port. On arrival, I found out that because the brig (the only free ship given to the player) is a military vessel and not a trading vessel, I could not dock at this port to complete the mission. I asked in global chat about this and was helpfully told that I could dock and complete the mission if I bought a trading cutter. Great. How should I make the money needed to buy this trading cutter? The starting ship doesn't have enough cargo space to take any cargo mission, and personnel transport missions cannot be completed if the destination is a different faction port from your home port. In my case, all personnel transport missions were to hostile ports, and there is nothing to indicate this when you accept the mission. I bring this up only to give one example of the many ways the game wastes your time for seemingly no explicable reason.

If none of the missions offered are completeable, then surely combat is a way to make some money, right? If this brig is indeed a military vessel which cannot dock at enemy ports, then maybe I've been going about this all wrong. I hunted around for a while, looking for the smallest and weakest NPC trading vessel which I could capture or sink in order to make any amount of money whatsoever. At length I found a small trading cutter, the smallest and weakest ship I've yet seen. The free brig that players are given is classed as sixth rate; this trading cutter is seventh rate. It is smaller, has fewer cannon, and a smaller complement of crew. It seemed like the perfect target.

I started combat and tried all the methods taught to me by the tutorials: steer with your sails in addition to the rudder; use chain shot to destroy the sails and masts; destroy the armor with round shot and then use grapeshot to clear the decks. I found that it was not only faster than me, but its cannons were more effective. Direct hits with chain shot did negligible damage to the sails, and even after destroying all its armor plating with round shot, its return volleys with round shot killed more of my crew than my point blank broadsides of grape shot did to its unarmored and unprotected top deck. After nearly 45 minutes of fighting to a stalemate, I was blown onto a sandbar and the cutter escaped.

I am sure more experienced players would've easily been able to win this engagement, but that isn't really the point. What is a new player expected to do, or even ABLE to do, to secure any kind of foothold and advance in the game at all? What's the point of sinking the time and effort needed for the game's frankly ludicrously punishing grind when the servers are wiped every few months? I persevered and sought other ports, where I found other personnel transport missions to friendly ports which allowed me to earn enough money to buy a slightly better ship. With this ship, I could do cargo missions and earn enough money to buy a better ship still, but after almost 5 hours of this, I was still far from reaching even rank 2. Increasing your rank is necessary to increase your crew capacity, which is needed to run any vessel except the most absolutely entry level vessels. Why is the game designed this way?

The most frustrating aspect of the whole experience is that I could feel the nucleus of a fun game beating within this mess. In a different context, the long journeys from port to port could have felt relaxing and atmospheric. The lengthy progression could have felt challenging but rewarding. Instead, I felt like I was playing a game that is at war with its own playerbase, and especially with new players. Rather, it feels like it is not the game itself that is hostile to players; not the difficulty or the interface or the PvP (though none are particularly welcoming); rather it feels like the developers themselves have gone out of their way to make the early game progression as counterintuitive and frustrating as possible.

This review has grown long. For those of you still reading it, did you find it boring? Was it repetitive? Did you feel like it was wasting your time, but saw it through just to see if there was something at the end that might redeem the time you invested into it in any way? If so, I am satisfied that I have properly conveyed the experience of playing Naval Action. I am afraid that, likewise, there is nothing waiting for you here, and your time has been wasted and can never be returned.

This is very nearly a dead game. When I logged on, there were around 100 people on my server. I suspect that most of these players have been around for a long time and are desperately hoping that the game will improve, or at least won't get any worse. Judging by some of the other reviews from veteran players, I think it's time to let go.

waste of time. they deleting factions so u get fewer choices and usa is gone

The entire development studio has a very low IQ because they support Zelensky's terrorist regime in Ukraine.