Naval War: Arctic Circle provides players the opportunity to command both real life and experimental military hardware in a fight to control the supply lines and seas of the North Atlantic. As a real-time strategy game, the focus of combat relies more on stealth, detection and deployment of countermeasures than it does brute force or overwhelming numbers.
The problem is that there is a large gap between what the game claims to be able to do versus what any average player will actually be able to accomplish. By providing only a brief tutorial you are never sufficiently introduced to or explained the intricacies of the radar detection and countermeasure system, a consequently will rely more on a trial and error method in the approach to solving the game’s piecemeal mission structures.
The graphics of the game itself are relatively deceptive – in several of the screenshots provided by the publisher, you’ll note that planes, subs, ships and sunsets are featured prominently in the upper portion of the screen, with what looks like a mini-map down below. You will almost never find this to be true of the actual game itself.
Players have the option of choosing which of these two windows occupies the upper portion of the screen, and once you realize that the pretty pictures of airplanes serve no real functional purpose – you can’t click on, command, or in any other way control or interact with what you are seeing – the “mini-map” takes center stage. From there you can zoom in and out of large scale areas, but going down as close to your units as possible only reveals colored, wire-frame outlines representing the units on the map. Visually, the game is underwhelming.
Functionally, the game doesn’t fare much better. The controls themselves are relatively clunky and only become serviceable with the inclusion of a “real time” mechanic, which essentially means that if you allow the game time to progress in a 1:1 ratio, the several hours it would take a 747 to fly across the pond would actually take several hours in the game. Thankfully, real time basically serves as the pause button – whenever something of particular importance happens (and you can decide what that means to you), the game ramps its speed down to a crawl.
Once the game is effectively paused, with a missile slowly creeping toward some fishing trawler you are obligated to protect, the idea is that you are supposed to effectively and strategically respond. But once a torpedo is headed your way, very rarely will you be able to do anything about it. There are ships that have countermeasures, true, but the majority of evasive actions such as deploying flare from planes to escape locked-on missiles happens automatically. Really, what you are meant to do when the game pauses is acknowledge that you’ve already screwed up by not previously detecting your attacked and firing at him before he had the chance to fire at you. This is where the system breaks down.
You have units at your disposal that can turn on multiple types of sonar, radar, deploy buoys in the water and fly search patterns. You can click on your units to turn on every piece of radar and detection software available all you want though – it never seems to actually change anything. Turning radar on never suddenly reveals any hidden threats, though I will freely admit that I may just be doing it wrong. The reason I am so free to admit that in this instance though is because if I am doing it wrong, that is a fault engendered by the game’s failure to teach me how, rather than the fact that I was never in the Navy.
Consequently, when you play the game you will blunder your way through missions, sometimes achieving quick success, sometimes achieving quick failure. Worst of all, sometimes you will achieve nothing at all. Each mission, which is composed of a single map and military action point, provides you with a specific number of units for disposal. If all your anti-air planes get shot down, then don’t expect to make more. If you fire off too many rounds (you can decide how trigger happy each individual unit is) and you burn through all your ammo before completing your objective, you will be stuck endlessly circling enemy naval units, powerless to complete your objective.
This makes the game seem difficult, but the reality is that if you do everything correctly you will breeze through every challenge. The realization then that there is a set, specific path to choose, or a particular sequence of events that need to take place in order to win each map basically means that there’s little actual strategy involved. You either did it right and you moved on, or you did it wrong and started over. As an example, the mission where you are tasked with protecting the fishing trawlers, your first step should be to move them out of harm’s way. Failing to do that inevitably results in a submarine ambush which there seems to be no way to prevent, again apart from moving the ships. That isn’t really naval warfare, where you can adapt and adjust tactics to overcome the enemy or recover from a loss. That’s more like Minesweeper, where if you make the wrong clicks in the wrong order, you start over again.
No doubt if you are a military buff, the names and numbers of everything on the right side of the screen will have a great deal of meaning for you and might even stir some excitement, but chances are you won’t recognize any elite piece of hardware taking off from the flight deck of one of your battleships. That’s a shame, because it seems like it could have been a genuinely exciting aspect of the game. In fact, there are many points here that seem like they could have been genuinely exciting. The problem is that the game forces you to bring too much specialized knowledge to the table to find any of that real enjoyment.
Final Score: D+
Compared to:
Hasbro Family Game Night’s Battleship: Battleship has all the same basic premises as Naval Warfare: stealth, detection, strategy. A game of Battleship can last as long as a mission in Naval Warfare. The flaw in Naval Warfare is that there’s no way to recover once you are down, where similarly in Battleship once your opponent has a hit on one of your ships, your only recourse is psychological warfare. What gives Battleship the edge is that when you lose there, you’ll know you shouldn’t have put all your ships together in the middle, whereas if you lose at Naval Warfare, you won’t necessarily know why or what it is that you could have done better. And the graphics in Battleship are more impressive.
Harold and Kumar go to White Castle’s Battleshi(p)s: Much like Naval Warfare, a rousing game of Battleshi(p)s does not have any clear rules that outside observers can understand. While it might have made sense to some, stepping into the middle of either of those games is really much more foul than entertaining. Although eating cheap tacos is a more palatable entry fee than the $5 it will cost to purchase Naval Warfare, you’ll certainly get more out of Naval Warfare in the end. Unless you find some really, really cheap tacos. Possibly from a neighborhood where there are no stray cats.
