Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age Reviews

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☑ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☐ Old Fashioned ☑ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☑ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☑ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☑ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☑ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

If you like graphics this entire genre of game isn't for you. Sure they got a nice viewbox of the action but its totally irrelevant. Really its just lines on a map. The same formula since harpoon still holds strong today. Complex in its simplicity its the standard for naval strategy. Shame mp is not available to many games in this genre. Some of the battles on here play alright on 1x time compression....but other you need to bump it up. I hope they explore some mp compatibility though tough it is for such a game format.

This game fulfills my need to coordinate complex naval operations and play scenarios. The mission editor is very complex but is packed with freedom and content. Workshop and mods are INSANELY good already. Beta branch also runs smooth, would pay full price again.

I like this game alot However. Could we please fucking do something about the radio man saying "Contact faded" "Contaced Gain" about 15 million times non-stop because there are some airplanes flying in a circle litterally 100 nautical miles away. Please. Perhaps a cooldown on when the guy says contact fade on new tracks or what have you or just a range limit on what he'll say it about for certain object types (Much lower for planes for example than warships)

I am beginning to love this game!! As a former player of Harpoon and Cold Waters and a US Navy Surface Warfare Officer I can't stop playing

I want to like the game but the unit AI is way to dumb. Enemy planes flight straight into AA missiles without reacting to them for example. It spoils the experience a bit. I guess people like this because there are no other viable alternatives.

The ships do not do what they are told to do and just change their mind every now and again and do what they want to do. Disappointing as it has so much potential.

Early access and big price tag is a scary combination, and you won't have the specifics of this game under control by the time you're past those 2 hours of Steam's refund policy. But if you like this sort of game (the one where you spend most of the time looking at a tactical map), have an interest in Cold War naval and a surprisingly big amount of aerial vehicles or like long-range missile warfare, this game is worth the risk. It offers an alright amount of missions and the devs recently released a linear campaign, the modding community adds a lot of missions on top of it (though it is one of those games where big updates kill all the mods and you have to wait for em to update). The ship models are really good looking, and have good animations on missile launches and aircraft takeoffs. The missile trails and explosion effects are also really pretty. It's not a game without faults though, enemy AI can be really stupid, your units can ignore orders or glitch out completely and if missions go on for too long the game sometimes gets very unpredictable. It is also a game with a steep learning curve, especially if you're new to the specifics of radar usage, submarine combat and missile defense. If you're unsure, I recommend watching some "Stealth17 Gaming" videos on YouTube. He gives a good view of what gameplay is like for a mid-level player, he shows advanced stuff like how to calculate intercept courses and ranges effectively with mapping tools but also makes some stupid mistakes to strike a nice balance.

Defending against a large incursion of Syrian warships, Harpoon missiles get spoofed and re-engage with a neutral cruise liner. Horrific war crimes committed, sparking wider regional conflict. 10/10

At the time of writing this game is still in early access. I formerly played the original Harpoon as well as CMANO and CMO. This is very similar to those prior games in overall playstyle. Because CMO is the most recent of these three predecessors, I will use it for comparison. There are two main windows including a 3D view of the world as a fixed window and a resizable second window that overlays this. The secondary window is where actual commands are given and are very, very similar to CMO. For planes you can select heading, altitude, and speed. For subs you can select heading, depth (including above or beyond the boundary layer), and speed with or without accepting cavitation. Ships get the same but without depth. In addition, you can select how much EMCON you want and broad rules of engagement. Units can act independently or can be put in groups and commanded in formation. If you have played CMO, this will all seem very second nature. Compared to CMO, there are some realism gaps. In real life, most missiles spend all of their energy getting up to speed, then coast to the target (some cruise missiles with air breathing engines are an exception). This means the missile's energy starts low, gets very high, then drops over time until it just falls out of the air. This is all modeled in CMO but is simplified in Sea Power. In Sea Power, a missile gets to top speed nearly instantly, then continues at max speed until it reaches its max distance. Airplanes like the TU-95 can go from 6,000 feet to 35,000 feet in just a few minutes without losing speed. Etc. This all shows that energy management is simplified and currently can't be used in strategy. Score one for CMO over Sea Power. Having said that, unless you add the third party TacView to CMO, your only immersion in the game is your imagination. Units are only an icon on the world map and a static picture in the corner showing a historic photo of an example of what that unit looks like. For pure gameplay that is enough. In Sea Power, that icon view is reproduced (but not the historic photo). What is wildly different in Sea Power is that each unit is visually represented in 3D with all associated weapons. I just finished a game that included TU-22Ms with 3 gigantic air to surface missiles each. If I launced one missile, that missile left the rail and rocketed towards its target. When the plane was at cruising speed the wings opened and when at afterburner the wings swept back. An old school Soviet submarine with surface-to-surface missiles needed to surface, raised the launch tubes, and one by one launched missiles from tubes that opened. When missiles head towards enemy ships, those ships will fire surface to air missiles, cannon shells that get progressively more accurate, and chaff that can confuse the missile to fly harmlessly overhead. You can lock your view on one of your missiles to watch it drive towards the target as the target ship fires everything it has at it. Does any of this detail change gameplay? No, not really. But it really adds an amazing layer of immersion and fun. A perfect game would be CMO with this level of zoomed in detail to watch the action happen (without requiring purchase of a third party software) or this game with CMO's more realistic energy management.