PREVIEW : Waves of Steel (PC)
Are you a boat enthusiast? Does the prospect of designing and combating modern military craft make your fuzzy bits squirm? Do you know if port or starboard refers to the left or right side of the ship? In such a case, I have some good news for you: Waves of Steel could be exactly what you’re looking for.
Waves of Steel is a naval battle simulator and a free-form shipbuilder. You’re given a ship, which you can customize, and you must combat some bad guys. It makes fundamental promises and then absolutely delivers on them like an elevator pitch. The ship customization is simple enough to grasp yet sophisticated enough to create some unique and specialized ships.
The combat simulation is more akin to Forza Horizon 2 than it is to Forza Motorsport. It’s more of a casual arcade game than a hardcore simulator where you have to micromanage the bilge pumps and bow thrusters to get the most knots out of the sails.
The shipbuilding screen shows your ship from the top-down, with rectangles representing all of your equipment, weapons, smokestacks, and other features. A second layer depicts what’s going on below decks, with rectangles representing engines, reactors, and everything else that keeps the ship moving. There’s a fantastic mechanism in place here that requires you to balance whatever you bring with you. For example, you can arm your spacecraft with weapons and transform it into some torpedo-based Poseidon. However, there is a limited mass that your ship can carry while remaining afloat, so you’ll have to give up some armour and engines to do so, making you slower and more vulnerable to counterattacks.
Similarly, you can upgrade your engines to become The Sea’s Flash. On the other hand, Engines emit gases that must be vented to the surface, reducing the amount of space available on deck for armaments. It’s a well-balanced system that allows you to tailor your build to the type of player you are. You’re continually gaining new upgrades and pieces, causing you to return to the builder to reoptimize your ship.
It’s time to take your ship out for a spin and attack some other garbage boats, with teabags by the kettle, socks in the sock drawer, and the doormat shaken off and laid at the front door (again, I know nothing about boats). This section goes precisely as you’d anticipate. It’s not difficult – forward and backwards move you forward, respectively, with left and right rotating you around. You also have a boost mode that allows you to fight faster and a dodge mode to move around more freely.
When you enter combat, the nearest adversary will instantly lock on to you, with buttons to scroll between other adversaries in range. Then you can fire your equipped weapon, with the option to switch to one of your other weapons if necessary, albeit some weapons require specific enemy groupings to fire. Torpedoes, for example, will only fire when enemies are at your ship’s side. There is also a button to ram the attacker in front of you as a last-ditch attack, which was certainly my most used button in the game.
Accessibility is a key consideration. It’s always wonderful to see a game that focuses on being as accessible as possible. It falls on the proper, non-gatekeeping side of the difficulty-in-video-games issue, actively encouraging players to play on whatever difficulty they like, with a loading screen message that says, “Play on the setting that’s the most fun for you – there’s no incentive to increasing the difficulty.”
If handling all of your guns at once is too much for you, you can turn them all to autofire so you can focus just on the ship’s sailing. You may also completely customize everything, rebinding controls and modifying the UI to suit your needs.
In conclusion, Waves of Steel is a well-made game aimed towards a specific demographic. Waves of Steel is already on your radar (sonar?) if you’re a boat nerd, and you’ll probably enjoy it. Boats aren’t my thing, but I still had a good time messing around with the builder and blowing up some bad guys. I’m also always in favour of a development method that prioritizes accessibility. Therefore I have high hopes for Waves of Steel and TMA Games.
REVIEW : Spooky Ghosts Dot Com (PC)
