Navy Strike Reviews

Navy Strike is an ancient game from 1995. It's a whopping 29 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. This was a very routine, mediocre DOS era flight sim (I guess you could run it under Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 which all just ran on top of DOS anyway), they tried to add some strategy elements, too. The concept is not the problem (it rarely is). This game is so old it runs in DOSBOX and doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration. It has a dated control scheme, dated graphics, and runs poorly due to the DOSBOX emulation. While DOSBOX is a fine tool for those seeking retro gaming, it's not really appropriate for ancient abandonware like this to be dumped on Steam without any modernisation, this is just a greedy cash grab from developers trying to get your money for dead software, they want to pay them a second time for a game you probably already owned. To make matters worse, it's a sloppy bit of repackaging, badly optimised (even for a DOSBOX game), and apparently they stripped out the soundtrack too, you know, it's important to add insult to injury when gouging gamers for abandonware. The poor quality of this DOSBOX port of an old abanadoned game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Navy Strike is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $4 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Navy Strike is a fine flight sim from Rowan Software from teh MS-DOS era, however this release of the game has been sloppily done by the publisher - the dosbox settings have not been optimised (which is a problem for anyone who is not familiar with dosbox and so not aware they can fix these up themselves) and the have stripped the music out of the game - the music was originally on the cd, but as no cd image is mounted with this games install, only the sound effects will play and not the dynamic music whilst i recommend the game itself, i cant recommend this shoddy, cynical release

Sadly, this Rowan public domain classic game, Navy Strike, only runs in a minimized DOS box with no apparent way to maximize into anything approaching a full window. And critically, the game runs at only about 4fps, and without its dynamic music (and yes, music is turned ON.) Back in the day on a 486, this game ran beautifully, but on a newish Win 10 computer it appears to be a non-starter. Disappointing.