Recent reviews by umad41

I do actually enjoy playing the game, but progression is such a grind, very obviously designed to fleece money out of the impatient, that I cannot recommend playing it. If you want to play with the early-war stuff only I guess a strong maybe? Experienced players enjoy punching down on newbies in those tiers though so, the whole process is a meatgrinder tbh.

Better than KSP 2, certainly recommend buying this one over it's dead sequel.

I'm still really, really bad at this game, but I can't deny that it's a lot of fun

Very crunchy damage model, decent driving, not much to do outside the sandbox. I enjoy driving around mindlessly irl quite a bit so this is just a good time sink when I'm bored, turning on some music and bombing around the streets in different and interesting cars, occasionally wrapping them around a building or straight up sending it off a cliff. It's a good time, but you *probably* won't get the same playtime out of it that I did.

Very early access, but quite playable. I feel like this might take a while to get truly good at, and the controls have a level of clunkiness to them. But if you can adapt around that, it's a very interesting simulator, I love the ASW/Submarine Warfare mechanics, it seems to be modeled quite well, taking into account the thermal layer and currents. I also really like the emphasis on EMCON, if you run around blaring active radar everywhere you go you will catch all of the missiles with your face.

I have found that ships are maybe TOO prone to damage? If your ships are hit there's basically a guarantee they will sink unless they are hit by very minor gunfire, and damage control teams really don't seem to do much. Of course that is very open to change, considering that I am talking about the first public release here, but it still colors my experience with the game. Overall I can recommend it as it sits, it's quite fun, very beautiful and I think the dev team is dedicated to continuing development, so you don't have to worry about having wasted your money.

Very fun ship building game, now with aircraft carriers.

TLDR; This game is brilliant, it may consume large portions of your time beyond even just playing the game, but it is very very fun, be careful with the community though, people are very stuck on the "Meta" mindset.

So you wanna build a boat? This game is a brilliant environment to achieve that goal, you can build whatever boat you can imagine once you fully understand how it's builder mode works. Or hovercraft, tank, airship, or plane. The hard part is that understanding part, the best thing I can recommend to you if you want to get started in this game is watch a few tutorials on building ships, just the basics. And anytime you want to learn something more advanced (custom guns, engines, decorations, etc) go find a youtube tutorial about it. As far as the gameplay goes, it's pretty fun, I like the adventure mode quite a bit, but the designer is where you will probably sink the most hours, designing a functional vehicle can take quite a while (I think I've sunk like 20+ hours on a VERY large battleship before). Basically if you like games like Space Engineers, Kerbal Space Program, or other games like those I think you will get a LOT of mileage out of this game. Now if I had to level a complaint about the game I would say that it would likely be the community. Several of my interactions with the community that plays this game have basically amounted to being told that I am terrible at this and should stop trying, as opposed to levying any constructive criticism and advice, or they tell me that the way I am doing something, while perfectly functional, goes against the current meta for the game, and is therefore completely useless against other player's craft, which is a WILD statement considering that this game isn't a PvP game. It's a building game. Anyways rambling aside, the game is good, definitely play it, be careful how you interact with the community, some people are massive gaping you-know-whats, and most importantly have fun

I really really like the management part of this game, but the battle simulator part is so frustrating because the AI refuses to actually stand and fight you unless you purposefully handicap yourself and only fight it with exactly equal forces. So it either creates an incentive to NOT use the wonderfully powerful navy you've been designing all game, so you can actually resolve wars in a reasonable time frame, at risk of losing the war, or, it incentivizes you to make every ship as fast and tanky as humanly possible to be able to chase down and destroy the cowardly AI fleets and you just have to hope they never turn and fight, because you don't ACTUALLY have fire superiority anymore. I really, really, really, really want to like this game in it's entirety, but I am so frustrated from chasing around the French Navy for the past 6 hours I can hardly even think. Until they make the battle sim AI more aggressive I can't actually recommend this, it's just too painful to play.

Probably one of the best games to come out recently, wonderfully funny satire, packaged with very very strong squad based gameplay.

I, personally, have had fun with this game at times, however I don't think many other people will. The game throws lots of very good units at you very quickly, and has a very very fast time to kill in engagements. It gives you a very big toolkit, some easy logistics, and a persistent army that you can tailor to your playstyle (in theory) BUT in the campaign you are kind of railroaded into choosing very safe options to safeguard your units, and will still lose a lot of them as you play and the game just feels very at odds with itself. Like the low time to kill combined with an inability to replace downed squad members in mission just feels like it's conspiring to bleed you dry of all good combat capability in the first third of a mission and leaves you kind of scrambling to try and work around not losing your damaged squads for the rest of the mission while still completing all of your objectives with a dwindling supply of men and vehicles. It's just not cohesive. I'm still going to finish it, because I AM having some fun with it, it's just not as much fun as you could be having with say, Homeworld or one of the old Total War games.