Perang Laut - Maritime Warfare Reviews

TL:DR good theme, amibtious goal, disastrous execution. Perang Laut - Maritime Warfare is a game based on naval expeditions between the 15th and 18th century in the area that is now modern Indonesia. You basically play as one of the multiple regional powers to attempt to achieve hegemony in the islands. Now, from the screenshots, one can already expect that this game have neither graphic nor good english pronounciation. But this is not the thing I'm going to nitpick today. Like any good gamer jumping to a new game, the first thing I do was to look for in game options; music/bgm, VSync/windowed mode, etc. Which was unfortunately not present on the main screen. Oh well, I can live without that. Then I jumped to the tutorial. First steps are okay, but once I started getting into building my own buildings and sending out my first navy, things started to get.. weird. In my first tutorial run, I followed the tutorial, clicked on the research button and the resources button, all good. Though there are no explanation on what the resources are and finding where these resources are produced is another problem in itself. But no biggie, I'll still follow up on it. Then comes the part where I get to build my own buildings. Nice. First time I did it without problem, good. Job done. Then I get to send out my first navy. Selected a couple of ship, although there are no option to switch back and forward between ships, I theorize that since there are a limited type of ships, when I've switched between them all, it'll go back to option one. This logic works. Now I can switch back to my first ship type after scrolling through ~12 others. Unsophisticated, but if it works, it works. Then I try adding men, wood and rice to my armada. Again, the button only adds resources, can't find any indication that you can take them away. Fine, you can cancel navy building process and go back to the first scene. No biggie. Except I pressed escape instead of back, which threw me out of the current session. Should've read and remembered that better. And I restarted the tutorial again. Baby steps, done, now let's build that building. But.. I can't? Oh, I'm missing wood. Alright, let's wait until the city stocks up on wood then. 18 turns later and a rebellion which saw a city previously under my command now a new kingdom, I still haven't got my wood. Where could I have gone wrong? I quit the session, restart the tutorial again, and same result. That is until the Xth time, I somehow get to see the city management screen where I can see if I want to export wood or not. In my hesitation, I clicked on it, which finally stopped the city from exporting precious, precious wood, so that I can build my building. Finally. Now, back to navy-ordering. Ships selected, men ordered, rice loaded... and there are -28k wood that I can load? Oh well, let's try that nonetheless. After randomly pressing somewhere around the "Go outside" word, I finally got my first navy out. Yay! Now let's click around on it.. wait, why's my navy gone? Alright, let's make a new one. Click on city, click on shipyard, designate ships, rice and men, and oh look, the wood situation is finally under control. Good then, second try. Second navy. Not clicking around and follow the order "send the navy to Sriwijaya". At that instant I regret not retaining any memories of classes in pre-modern Indonesia. I know Sriwijaya is nowhere near Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, or Papua, but I still scroll around nonetheless. Oh, it's a coastal city on north Bali. Duh. Alright. Click, click, ship moves and when it reaches Sriwijaya.. it disappears. What? At that moment, around half an hour have passed. At this point I can still ask Steam to give back my €5.60-ish euro because... this game is a burnt on the outside, but raw in the inside. You can still stomach the appearance, but the gameplay and the tutorial does barely anything to help you understand the game. Not only basic options are missing, but basic functions such as zooming in and out and moving around the map are not even discussed in the tutorial. This might be okay for experienced gamers (we can try the classic WASD, if not, arrows, one of them should work), but for a total beginner (including the horrid lack of guides)? Perang Laut - Maritime Warfare is Sengakala's second game and judging by its first game and an article written by the devs for the Historical Games Network, at least one of them hast to have some interest in the history of Indonesia, which is something that is sorely underrepresented in video games. Unfortunately this game does not do this history justice. The spectrum of what the devs wanted is huge and respectable, but how they approach making the game needs major overhaul. And since I'm not shy to rub salt on wounds, you'd do much better to spend the normal price of this game (€10) on an old copy of Tradewinds (sadly no longer available on Steam afaik). It might not scratch the same itch as what Perang Laut might try to do, but for a game that now is of legal age, Tradewinds is (unfortunately) a much better polished game.