A new World War II game coming at you! What’s that? You have already played and heard about a lot of World War II games? Oh I see, well what about an FPS –a first person ship. That’s right, in this game you get to control a ship of your choosing to patrol around the waters familiar to the events of World War II in order to destroy enemy ships. That game is World of Warships brought to you by War Gaming and even better? It’s free to play!

In the game you have a choice to captain four different types of ships:

Battleship: This is your thick armored, heavy damage, tank of a ship. However, they are also heavy and slow moving. They have very slow max speeds and take painfully slow turns. In addition to their main batteries doing a large amount of damage, the traverse time on the main battery can be very long. These ships do well in open water being escorted by cruisers to protect them from enemy aircraft or destroyers.

Cruisers: This is your jack of all trades ship. This ship is medium armored and your main batteries do not do an extensive amount of damage. That being said, the traverse speed on their main batteries are typically pretty quick. They have very effective maneuverability that allows you to avoid torpedo’s with enough warning and also enemy fire from long distance with enough skill. Another cool feature is they are also equipped with magnificent anti-aircraft guns and can deploy one escort plane at a time to help provide air defense.

Destroyers: Quick and stealthy is the name of the game for the destroyers. They are very light armored and typically do not cause a lot of damage with their main batteries. They can provide smoke screens that can cause them to be invisible even at close range. These ships carry a fair amount of torpedoes and that is arguably their greatest asset. Destroyers are great at hunting enemy ships and catching ships off guard while they are engaging in other types of combat or sending off torpedoes in tight waters that offer little means of escape for enemy ships.

Carriers: They play the game like no one else. While everyone in the game is playing an FPS style gameplay, the carrier is playing a strategy game. Carriers use planes to do all the fighting in a show of aerial dominance. You will have three types of planes on your carrier: fighter, bomber, and torpedo. The fighter plane can be used to fly as an escort plane for your bomber and torpedo crafts, or they can be used to scout the enemy out for your teams’ ships. The bomber and torpedo aircrafts offer the means of causing a tremendous amount of damage to enemy ships depending on skill. Be careful, though, anti-aircraft guns and enemy fighters can cause large amounts of damage to these critical aerial pawns.

In order to acquire new ships, the game works off a tech tree format of acquiring new ships. In each battle you earn research points that you can use to upgrade different modules of your ship (e.g. main battery, ship class, propulsion system, etc.). These research points are also used to upgrade to the next ship when you acquire enough. As the game first starts out you are given a tier 1 cruiser to do your fighting. You have tier 1 through tier 10 to upgrade on most of your ships. Destroyers begin at tier 2, battleships at tier 3, and carriers at tier 4.

The game’s mechanics are made to be user friendly. After a few rounds you will be cruising around the waters like a pro. From that point on its just learning when it’s best to use HE (Heavy Explosive) vs AP (Armored Piercing) rounds and when to engage and when not to engage with a ship. From my own experience, it took me a bit of time to learn where I should be aiming at on the enemy ship in order to cause good damage. My first couple of games I was either over shooting, under shooting, leading too much, not leading enough, or just hitting a well armored spot and not causing much damage. After some practice and learning the mechanics myself, I was quickly able to find my niche in game style.

The audio on the game is astounding. You can hear the waves of the ocean, the engine running at full speed, the main batteries thundering away, the pounding of rounds hitting your ship – the audio visual details put into this free-to-play game is a notable success that World of Warships has accomplished. It really does a great job of setting the atmosphere of you being out to sea in a battle. Additionally, the team at Wargaming provided engaging soundtracks as background music for your battles. The music helps provide the intensity of the battles.

Visually, the game is breathtaking. Every detail is realistic. From the waves rolling rhythmically around you to clouds in the sky, World at Warships provides a sensory overload in its depths of realism. On the islands you cruise by you can see different unique houses on some of them, or just abundant forest on other islands. The ships are historically accurate, as well, which is a huge contributing factor to the game’s realism. You can tell that the developers spent a lot of time studying the ships in order to accurately depict them. In some cases, seeing a ship like the Tirpitz (Bismarck Class Battleship) it can be terrifying and it might be time to turn the other way before you get destroyed.

For now, the game has 4 different countries that can be used for your warships at this time. United States and Japan have an extensive full list of each type ships to be used at your arsenal. Russia, has two types of Cruisers that can be purchased as a premium member. Germany has just one battleship that can be purchased at this time. What is really interesting is that it is not Allies vs Axis in this game, it’s a group of ships vs a group of ships. Meaning, that you can have all a US ship and Japan ship fighting together to take down a German ship or any other variety. Country of origin of each ship does not matter in this game.

BOTTOM LINE:

This game is highly recommended! I spent many hours playing this title and having a blast learning the various ships and different ways to fight. Just when you think you learned everything you can know, you unlock a new ship or a different class of ship and the fun starts over again. My only problem is that it took me a bit of time to figure out that you should be playing regular battles against other people instead of Co-Op battles against the PC. The amount of points you can get each game is much larger and the ability to learn while fighting a person instead a computer is much better. My only negative feeling about this game is that after a while of fighting numerous battles is that it gets very repetitive. Even though every battle is different, it becomes very similar over time which can cause the playability to become monotonous.