A brilliant strategy game that can entertain you, but can also be very bland and boring to play.

World of Warships is a game that I always keep installed despite the fact I only ever play it every now and then. Admittedly, I have been playing it more recently as my better half, @Deeviras plays it quite a bit and asks me to play with her. For me, I can get hyped to play the game, more so when there are more clan members online, excited at the prospect of some team play, but then the games limitation and visuals put me off after only a few hours of playing.

Narrative.

• There isn't one. It is simply an online team battle arena game where you can take control of a military navel ship and blow some shit up... if blowing shit up could be considered as a narrative, then I am all for it.
  It is a far cry from the story based games I typically gravitate too, but the simple concept of the game is attractive, more so the strategy side and thinking ahead.

• On occasion the devs do create events that mix things up with even fewer of them events having a base narrative, and the clan missions again having a very simple story for the mission you are on. Beyond that. Don't expect anything in the way of a story. This game is aimed more towards those that, like I said, like to blow shit up.

Image Source/Credit - @TechMojo Live Stream

Visuals.

• This part is very mixed. What I mean by that is, the game at first glance looks impressive, crisp graphics, mechanics and some animations, but when you are in battle and start to pay attention to the finer details, they spoil the whole look of the game.

• My main gripe with the visuals is the water texture (s).... with this being a game that is primarily located at sea, you would think that every attempt would be made to make the water textures and the interaction with that texture be as perfect as possible, it isn't. The water texture by itself looks fantastic and almost passes for the real thing, complete with rolling waves and ripples, white caps and reflectiveness. It is very similar to what you could see in other games, like GTAV, Hellblade, even Crysis, but it is when you see your ship, other ships or anything else interact with it where it falls apart. As your ship moves through the water, instead of the sea texture interacting with the ship, you instead get a bow wave texture that simply overlaps, creating 2 transparent textures that don't interact on any level, the water texture remains unaffected, and the bow wave texture is simply pasted over the top, it looks disgusting when you realize how sloppy the devs have been. It doesn't stop at the ships, when a ship sinks, when a shell hits the water... all have secondary textures tacked on top of the original. Its not as though the technology isn't available to make it look more realistic, it just seems as though the devs either got lazy, sloppy or simply didn't care. For a game that is solely located in the water, this would be top priority, instead we get something that a backstreet developer would produce.

• The ships themselves are immensely detailed. From what I gather, (I know nothing about battleships) the ships in the game are modelled after very real ships from history. To find out more, I compared a small selection of ships that I have in my inventory to the real ones, and from what I can tell, they are almost identical in every way. It is a similar deal with Wargaming's other titles, World of Tanks and World of Warplanes. So the primary aspect of the game is on solid ground and there is no argument to the contrary. The damage that the ships take is also very good. I prefer to use high explosive rounds when playing as they can and do cause fires on the enemy ships, but when the fire takes hold and is put out, the damage from the fire is very visible in the same location as where it was located. If a turret is damaged, torpedo tube or secondary, the damage can be physically seen. This is something that few games that are similar to this gets right.

• When navigating the UI for the first time, it can seem somewhat confusing, and to be fair, it is still slightly confusing to me. I'm fairly sure there could be a better way to order the UI and menus so they appear more simplified, but since I've been playing this game, the UI has remained almost the same as it has every been with no effort to streamline it to make it more appealing to newcomers to the game, this is why I always tell new players or recommend to anyone, that it is a complicated game to learn and you will have to persevere at it.

• The devs do a lot to keep the game fresh for its players as currently they are running an event where you can rank up and earn new skins, ships, flags and more for your trouble. Not to long ago they created an add on which placed the game in space, it still had many of the same mechanics as the sea version, but had all new maps and ships, complete with sound effects for that particular event, it was very good fun to play and a welcome change, even if it only lasted a month.

Image Source/Credit - @TechMojo Live Stream

Gameplay.

• I think the only real way to explain the gameplay would be... 'its a fucking grind'. The game is free and in order for the developers and publishers to make any money they have to put in microtransactions, its a given, but to avoid the 'pay to win' problem that many other free and not so free games suffer from, premium ships are limited as in you can not tier/level up from that ship, so the only real way to tier up, you have to earn ship experience which you use to research the next tier. In order to do that, you have to play the game with said ship. In the lower tiers, this is not much of an issue, but when you start getting beyond tier 7, you will start getting fed up of the grind. For premium users, its not as bad as you get 50% extra XP when playing. For free users though, it is a ball ache to level up. Not only that, but you also have to pay for the new tier ships using in game currency. Premium users can simply buy the tokens needed to purchase said ships, but free users again, have to grind away to earn the in game cash to buy. If you watched my recent stream of this game, I had a very similar problem, in that I grind away for 3 days to research a tier 8 ship, but was short 7 million in game currency in order to buy it. Fortunately I had several other ships to sell in order to do this, but the problem will be more prevalent when I want to get a tier 9.

• When in game, and not being decimated by the other team, it is fantastic fun, even more so when playing with friends. The problem comes in when you want to play with more than 2 other friends as you can only create teams of 3 in random battles. And the team play where you can have up to seven in a team, is limited to a single ship tier, which is pretty useless for a clan who has newcomers to the game. On more than a few occasions, my clan, Jolly Jack Rodgers, have had issues where some clan members are missing a ship tier, preventing them from joining in a battle. I can semi see the reasoning behind only allowing 3 team members in a random battle, but when considering that there is team chat available in the game, where strangers can talk to each other, why then, can't a whole team go into battle for training against unknown opponents?

• Clan/team play aside, if you are a solo player, playing for free, when levelling up through the tiers up to about tier 4 or 5, the game is quite good, reasonably paced and easy to like. But the games biggest problems come in after that as the ships become more expensive to gain and repair. You get a sense that the pace of each of the matches slows down a lot in that this is where the more technical and experienced players are located. They are more methodical in there gameplay and plan much further ahead, they know the best places on each map to locate themselves and know each of the ships weaknesses in the game. Maybe if I spent more time playing the game, I may get to that stage, but I consider myself an average gamer, only playing a game for a few hours a day and not always the same game, so I see it as very off putting for someone who wants to jump in and blow ship up. It is more so off putting that despite your best efforts, you are still grinding away to try and tier up so you can get a stronger, better ship, but your performance in game is directly reflected in the score at the end, and if your team looses, that score is lowered even more.

• My previous experience with team based gaming is based around the MechWarrior 3/4 games, and I think this is where the devs need to start taking some inspiration from. You can join a game as either an individual gamer, against a full team, and have a separate server for team v team gaming. Even if you look at the much newer MechWarrior Online, it is still the same principle, as are many other team based games. So it is strange for me to see a game like this, that make silly rules to protect the dudes who need a 'Safe Place'.

Image Source/Credit - @TechMojo Live Stream

Conclusion.

• It is a game that wasn't planned out too well, well not as well as Wargaming's best game, World of Tanks. The visuals are only appealing if you are doing nothing or don't care, but when you start seeing the smaller details, you can not un-see them. The UI is equally as bad, although there is a lot to take in when playing the game, with many aspects to learn, the UI is still very difficult to navigate for someone who has been playing for over 2 years, with no sign of it being streamlined. But on the other side of that disappointment is the primary reason for this games existence, the ships are impeccable with some awesome mechanics and damage visuals that other free games should be envious off. The gameplay could be better and just like the UI, less complicated when it comes to teams and individual players. And as much as I respect the devs decision to eliminate the 'pay to win' crap, there is still an issue of having to grind away which I found to be very boring.

6.5/10

• I can only stand playing this game by myself for a couple of hours at most, maybe 4 hours with a team, but it is a game that I wouldn't want to play by myself and the only reason I play it at all is because of my other half asking me to join her. I would much prefer to play some MechWarrior Online as it is more visually appealing, more polished with a much more simplified user interface and less of a grind, but while remaining just as strategic as World of Warships.

What did you like about World of Warships?
Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.

Stu @TechMojo

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