Navalia Reviews

I love the concept, but the user interface is bad. The game requires memorizing special mouse and keyboard shortcuts that are mentioned once in the tutorial and later have no on-screen equivalents. It can't decide whether UI is supposed to be controlled by mouse or keyboard, so it's a mix of both, suited for neither. It's a GUI that looks like point'n'click, but half of it is point'n'press-a-key. On my system it has trouble supporting 2560x1600 resolution. The screen looks like it was downscaled and upscaled again, making everything badly pixelated and the text nearly unreadable.

I wanted to like this one so damn much. Love the concepts, love the ship building even though it's clunky, love the "RTS" battles... But it's just so damn cryptic and front-heavy, and slow, and the difficulty is off, and customization is nowhere near as meaningful as it could've been... And the final nail in the coffin is the weird performance. 7 FPS in fullscreen, 55 when unfocused? 30-ish when windowed? What is going on here?

It's a broken game that's been abandoned by the developer - in fact that very same developer has outright suggested on several discussion threads to just request a refund asap instead of pestering them to fix the problem. where is the problem for me? the libraries used by the game are outdated and incompatible with any visual basic language code post-2007~2010... nor are there any fix-arounds for this (that even includes attempting to run in compatibility mode)... like some people will suggest; either steer away from this regardless of whether it's on sale or not, or buy it on sale but "buyer's beware" applies

I accidentally entered windowed mode at 1920 x 1080 and now I cant go back to fullscreen because i can't click the apply button.

This game has bugs, including ones that make building ships a massive, massive pain. Also, it's never going to get fixed. I'm going to finish this game because I hate myself. Please don't join me.

Overall, Navalia is an enjoyable experience. There is minor lack of polish here and there, but the first one or two playthroughs are fun. The game does a very good job of not overwhelming you with mechanics and micromanagement for what is essentially a 2-3 hour playthrough (if you are just starting out). The ship designer, as advertised, is fun and rewarding, and battles are a good representative of how well you are at designing your ships. The game, however, could have been much better if the battles weren't as easy as they are right now. Full review: https://youtu.be/EcUV1w8eJBo

I wish that there was a meh rating on Steam. This game has so much potential. Its ship builder is incredible and it's paired with a cool system for research. These 2 systems complement eachother well and are fun to use. My problem with the game(and the reason I refunded it) is that it got stale in my 2 hours of playing it! There are 2 enemy types(4 if you count the tiny supply and fighter ships) and all of my battles played out the same: 1. Get into range on queen so she sends out fighters. 2. Destroy fighters and suply ships. 3. Destroy queen. After awhile the downtime between battles and the lack off any variety sucked all the fun out of the game. If you want a ship builder to make your dream ship in and test it out in a simplistic playground then Navalia is for you. If you want a simple yet fun conquer the galaxy game then you should probably look elsewhere.

Promising game but has problems. The tutorial, its a text tutorial and you get like 10 screens of information on how different parts of the game work. That's a lot of information coming at you once, I felt overwhelmed by it but nevertheless I got the hang of the game. Ship building was a little bit of a let down. The UI is not good in the ship editor, I wish the game would just give you a simple info card with the core info such as: how many parts you can have, your power levels etc. The game is very easy when you start off, which is not a bad thing. On the map you cant stop the enemy ships with the defensive outposts, they only deal certain amount of damage to the enemy ships. I think this is a bit dumb, I expected that they would first need to destroy my defensive outposts but they just go through them. And you lose btw if your home planet takes too much damage. I wanted to play more before writing a review but I can't. I've reached a point where the game crashes every single time (100% certainty) after I do my turn. The game also loads way too long. Between every transition there is about 15-25 second loading. Hard to recommend the game in its current state.

Fun game but not much depth too it. In 2 Hours of gameplay you will have seen everything the game has to offer. But... those two hours are fun.

Torn about this, but I'm going to recommend it. It is a small conquer-the-galaxy style campaign and RTS, built around a really unique little ship design section which is really quite unique and worth trying the game for alone. Basically, you sketch out the shape of a ship, and then you get a grid to install components on. Many similar games just give you a grid and some pre-set shapes, but you can design it as you like. In addition, the research section allows you to tweak and upgrade both - for example, you can put research points into making a mass efficient piece of equipment, which will then draw more power, or a mass inefficient (heavy) piece which will be more power efficient. It is, however, relatively small and simple. Don't go into this expecting a full on 4x, and don't go into this expecting a very long chain of unlocks and upgrades. But is small and simple a bad thing? Not in this case, I think the developer's managed to make a game where all the parts in it work together reasonably well. Personally, I'm mainly struggling to find my sweet spot for which difficulty setting to use, but if you're a big fan of space games, the ship designer alone makes this one worth playing around with in my opinion. Just don't go into it with super high expectations.