Review: Naval Warfare (PC)

Naval Warfare doesn’t play very well on my laptop. That a game struggles on this hardware is not too surprising – I’m hardly running with a powerhouse here, but the fact that such a simple game doesn’t feature options to get as many people playing as possible is an astounding design decision.

One of the prettiest horde games ever

It’s a basic horde game. You’re a little ship facing wave after wave of increasingly more difficult enemy ships, and you need to use a range of weapons as well as your skill to defeat them. It’s an entertaining formula that has worked with games in the past, and it works here. The ship controls well thanks to the mouse, and there’s certainly a good variety of enemy ships to deal with. The basic gunships go down easily enough, but it doesn’t take long for boats with tricky defences or nasty weaponry to pop up.

There’s also some good multiplayer options available in addition to the single player games. And Naval Warfare looks really, really good. The water effects are impressive and the weapons are stylish and have real impact. It’s unusual for a horde game to have this kind of effort put into it.

Despite the struggle that my laptop had in playing this game, I enjoyed myself. It’s a frantic game with a finely tuned difficulty curve. The levels are well designed; for those five minute bursts of arcade fun, this is a great solution.

Not again!

So the game itself might not be a breakaway work of creative ingenuity, but it works well. It’s just that you need a good PC to run it. It’s a good lesson for indie developers to take note of – offering options for people with less advanced setups is a good idea. It’s great that the developers have paid such attention to the visuals and design of their game, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of playability. The reason the likes of Frozen Synapse and Dwarfs?! are so appealing is because anyone can play them, with no fuss or setup, and there is no reason this shouldn’t be the same. An update to add in those lo-fi options would be welcomed greatly.